twemoji-colr

Project to create a COLR/CPAL-based color OpenType font from the Twemoji collection of emoji images.

Note that the resulting font will only be useful on systems that support layered color TrueType fonts; this includes Windows 8.1 and later, as well as Mozilla Firefox and other Gecko-based applications running on any platform.

Systems that do not support such color fonts will show blank glyphs if they try to use this font.

Getting started

This project makes use of grunt-webfont and an additional node.js script. Therefore, installation of Node.js (and the package manager yarn) is a prerequisite. Grunt will be installed as a package dependency — no need to install it globally.

The necessary tools can be installed via yarn:

# install dependencies from packages.json, including `grunt-webfont`.
yarn

The build process also requires fontforge and the TTX script from the font-tools package to be installed, and assumes standard Perl and Python are available.

N.B. grunt-webfont is getting very old now, and may require node_modules/grunt-webfont/tasks/engines/fontforge/generate.py to be manually patched to use from shutil import which rather than from distutils.spawn import find_executable otherwise it will incorrectly complain about fontforge not being installed.

Both FontForge and font-tools can be installed via homebrew on OS X, or package managers on Linux:

# OS X
brew install fonttools fontforge

# Ubuntu, for example
sudo apt-get install fonttools fontforge python-fontforge

Building the font

Once the necessary build tools are all in place, simply running

make

should build the color-emoji font build/Twemoji Mozilla.ttf from the source SVG files found in twe-svg.zip file and extras, overrides directories.

N.B. make sure your python is pointed at the right one required by fontforge (e.g. 3.8)

You can then compress this into a WOFF via woff2_compress

sbix support

This branch contains a fairly ugly attempt to support emitting an sbix font as an alternative to COLR/CPAL. For this to work:

• Grab the latest twemoji release from https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji/releases
• Expand it and symlink the 2/72x72 (or assets/72x72 for twemoji 13) directory into this checkout
• Create a new twe-svg.zip: mv twe-svg.zip twe-svg.zip.old; zip -rj twe-svg.zip twemoji-13.0.0/assets/svg
• Check that isSbix = true in layerize.js
• Run the layerize manually (no need to run make): node layerize.js twe-svg.zip overrides extras build twemoji-sbix && ttx -o build/twemoji-sbix.ttf build/twemoji-sbix.ttx

This involves an awful lot of hardcoded sfnt sections, which have been cargoculted from:

• https://github.com/RoelN/ChromaCheck (to get a general idea of sbix fonts)
• http://www.typophile.com/node/103268 (to work out why FontBook wouldn't validate correctly (no post section))
• Apple Emoji Color (to compare their font metrics)
• the output of Glyphs.app when loading & saving our ttf to normalise it (post, OS/2, cmap sections)

Earlier versions of this relied on normalising the TTF via Glyphs to fix up the sections; however, this ran into the problems of:

• https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/crash-in-makeotfglyphs/11786 (Glyphs crashes on long glyph names, even though it derived them itself)
• https://forum.glyphsapp.com/t/pngs-in-sbix-exports-are-converted-from-8-bit-palette-to-32-bit-rgba/11787 (Glyphs expands PNGs from 8-bit to 32-bit on export)

...so instead, layerize has been fixed up to generate TTX which looks to work in practice.