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What’s “the full set” of emoji characters?
Any Unicode character can be drawn in color and Apple’s “Emoji character set” is also an arbitrary selection.

Sorry for not being clear. I mean support for the 722 code-points listed in the "Emoji in the Unicode standard" section listed here... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Cheers, Si

Ralf, do you mean in any one color? Because Emoji are actually multi-colored bitmaps.

hhp

Other fonts with characters in those Unicode ranges:
Symbola: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/
Android Emoji: https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/tree/master/data/fonts

Thanks!

Si

I see almost every emoji on the Wiki page (except the two-glyph flags and the Apple PUAs). I do have Symbola 6.02 and a small assortment of CJK fonts installed.

I guess Emoji isn't only on OSX? But isn't there some kind of IP obstacle? Maybe I'm remembering things wrong.

hhp

Because the emoji are part of Unicode anyone is free to make a distribute a Unicode encoded emoji font. Apple does have the only color Unicode encoded font as far as I'm aware, but Windows 8 (and Windows 7 via an update) have traditional monochrome support, as does Windows Phone, and there are probably others. Some apps, like the mail and messenger apps in Windows 8 will in some cases switch out the glyph for a color bitmap when they hit an emoji in a mail or message.

(And Microsoft's are much better-looking and stylistically stringent than Apple's mess.)

From what I recall of previous discussions, the Apple Color Emoji are more of a trade secret than anything, complete with undocumented tables.

Previous: http://typophile.com/node/83760 (abstract); http://typophile.com/node/96671#comment-523935 (concrete).

I don't run Windows at home, but if I can get my hands on the "Segoe Symbol" font I'll take a peek to see if this works the same as Apple's (ugly!) hack.

But isn't there some kind of IP obstacle? Maybe I'm remembering things wrong.

This forum software doesn't like them, that's for sure. It may have to do with the ultra-wide UTF encoding, or maybe not.

:-)

posted in error

Interestingly, Google's Gmail appears to have a full set of (bad) color Emoji available, including the rice balls and everything, but they're encoded and sent as images. Which rather defeats the purpose, you might as well have any set of smilies then.

Just tested on my Win 7 machine. It's updated to the latest Segoe UI Symbol font, but, alas, it doesn't appear to contain color emoji's (at least, not in the same format as Apple's -- a few non-standard tables and a couple of megabytes of PNG images).

Are they in color on its "native" platform, Windows 8?

No, see my March 29th post above...

"Apple does have the only color Unicode encoded font as far as I'm aware, but Windows 8 (and Windows 7 via an update) have traditional monochrome support, as does Windows Phone, and there are probably others."

Apologies, Si, must've overlooked your post.

Some apps, like the mail and messenger apps in Windows 8 will in some cases switch out the glyph for a color bitmap when they hit an emoji in a mail or message.

... must be the reason I kept finding images of colored emojis in Windows apps.

One more almost-a-font instance: Facebook supports some emoji, and displays properly encoded unicode emoji as embedded images. Doesn't copy-paste though.

Question: Has anybody noticed any download lag due to color Emoji? Aren't they a bit big, or does subsetting handle that fine? What I'm getting at is: Would it be viable to deliver colored text instead?

hhp

Normally you would have to have the color emoji font on your machine, so no downloading is involved. But perhaps you are referring to systems which send you graphics to make up for not having a font?

Hrant: Would it be viable to deliver colored text instead?

What does that mean?

What I'm talking about is hijacking the mechanism to deliver a color bitmap font (which could be installed, but maybe even "streamed").

hhp

Ah, now I sort of get you. The phrase 'deliver colored text' had me confused, because text is just character codes. So let's say that you're talking about delivering colour bitmap glyphs to represent those character codes. But what's the mechanism you propose 'hijacking'?

Would you anticipate much performance difference between serving emoji colour bitmap image files and serving emoji colour bitmap images stored within a font file?

I say "hijack" because I think it's all hush-hush. Has Apple published the font spec for color bitmaps? And how could it be made to work on Windows? Without being sued?

Performance: Back in the mid-90s I made the prototype of Mana-16, a bunch of tiny GIFs of grayscale letterforms coupled to a script that took a raw text file and generated an HTML file of hundreds of image declarations, thus rendering running text using grayscale bitmaps... The main performance problem was the size of the resultant HTML file! So an actual font was -and I suspect still must be- the only way to make this sing.

But this is all probably pointless anyway. Text size is too variable these days. Hmmm, unless a hand-made grayscale (or even better, subpixel) bitmap font can be rendered by collaging small hand-made elements that can be slid around, scaled, layered, to produce a range of sizes from a single master set... Man, I really have to stop thinking like a hacker.

hhp

There's always a bit of lag while the bitmaps are fetched, but it shortens a lot once they're in the cache. If you have ever edited a post on a phpBB-based board, you'll know already. The editor has a bitmap (GIF or PNG) emoji insert feature, y'see.

I tried to insert live text of one of these creatures into the text here and the whole post disappears.

😉 (but this one is not live, I used the HTML Entry)

Not showing on Windows (XP, FireFox) or OSX (FireFox or Safari). On Android (4.1) I actually get the little winking robot head though!

hhp

👍👎

Testing. I do see Boyer's emoji in color with Safari in OS X 10.7.

Decimal works but hex not: 👍

The one I use is 10.6.8 so maybe that's why. What version of Safari? What about FireFox?

hhp

I don't think the Apple Color Emoji font works with any app in OS X 10.6. Do you have a black/white font like Symbola installed? It may work in Firefox if you set the default font to that.

On 10.6.8, the only font I have that contains emoticons is DejaVu Sans. You can easily see using the character viewer or Apple's ftxinstalledfonts

% ftxinstalledfonts -f -U 0x1F609 | grep YES
56	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Bold
135	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed
543	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed Bold
572	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Bold Oblique
573	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans
580	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Oblique
637	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed Oblique
703	YES	DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed Bold Oblique

Those are all the fonts I have on 10.6 containing the winking face. If I set the default font in Firefox to Dejavu LGC Sans and override the font chosen by Typophile (Georgia), I see the winking face in Firefox on 10.6.8

Wow, you didn't even have to do an incantation with worm's blood.

hhp

Well, if you are willing to resort to risky incantations, here is what you can get in Safari on OS X 10.6.8.

How did I do that? I modified the system file DefaultFontFallbacks.plist and added DejaVuLGCSans (postscript name) in the fallback fonts for serif.

The file is in this folder
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/Current/Frameworks/Coretext.framework/versions/current/resources

I had to reboot to get it working.

Michel

PS On 10.6.8 with the modified file DefaultFontFallbacks.plist the winking face also shows up in Firefox, without overriding Georgia, and in Google Chrome.
On 10.8.3, Google Chrome displays no winking face at all (colored or not).

Winky and the Thumbs show up on my rig (XP Pro; K-Meleon 1.6; DejaVu LGC Sans 2.33, Symbola 6.02)

BTW what's the webfont situation with emoji?

hhp