Searching for a vector-based emoji font

Joshua Langman
Joshua Langman Posts: 94
in Font Technology
Hi all,

Quick question for the populace. Can anyone recommend an emoji font that is in the form of a traditional vector-based font, NOT a color font? I have been using Noto Emoji, but it's a bit too jaunty and cutesy for my purpose. I am typesetting the journals of murderers, and need a way to represent emoji in the most sober and straightforward way possible. I know this is kind of at odds with the whole emoji ethos, but … recommendations?

Many thanks.
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Comments

  • Simon Cozens
    Simon Cozens Posts: 776
    Try Symbola or DejaVu Sans.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,456
    https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/blob/master/assets/svg/1f3af.svg
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 94
    Thanks, Simon. Symbola may be the answer. Dave, I'm not sure what I'm looking at with your link. Is this a font? Am I missing something?
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 94
    By the way, it doesn't have to be free. I will pay for a high-quality solution, if one is out there.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 247
    These are probably too cutesy for your purposes, but mentioning in case: the assets used for Microsoft's fluent emoji are open source, and come in a few variants, including high-contrast and flat-colour. These could be used to make a font with B/W glyphs, OT-SVG, COLRv0, COLRv1 or sbix/png data.

    microsoft/fluentui-emoji: A collection of familiar, friendly, and modern emoji from Microsoft
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,388
    Does anyone know the source of the black and white glyphs shown in the Unicode Emoticons chart? I suspect that would be suitable for Joshua’s purposes.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 94
    Thanks, John. Pasting a different link here for reference:

    https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf

    Those would indeed work well, if anyone knows the source.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 990
    This document: https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n3826.pdf has the following marginalia:
    Maybe John knows how to get in touch with Michael Everson. See where that leads?
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,388
    You can contact Michael via his website:
    https://www.evertype.com/misc/bio.html

    Joshua, a problem you may encounter is that a lot of software is now emojified, i.e. it will display emoji characters using colour glyphs, even if that is not what you want, and even if the font also includes b/w glyphs. I have also encountered examples of emoji override, where the default local colour emoji font takes precedence in displaying some characters, and you need to find ways to force use of your desired font. [I first encountered this when some Byzantine scholars wondered why the Orthodox cross in their documents was showing up as     ☦️.]
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,388
    You may be able to force b/w emoji display using Variation Selector 15 (U+FE0E) after the emoji character, as explained here:
    https://www.codejam.info/2021/11/emoji-variation-selector.html

    That is behaviour defined by Unicode, but I don’t know how broadly and reliably it is implemented in software.

    In theory, you should see the first of these crosses as a purple emoji and the second as a b/w cross     ☦️️ ☦️︎ but I am not getting this reliably.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 367
    The design of emoji glyphs in the Unicode charts is basically the same as in the Symbola font.

    I was under the impression that Symbola was a free font (at least for personal use), but now it seems any public use requires a license starting at $15000!? (https://dn-works.com/wp-content/uploads/UFAS/Fonts.pdf)
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 247
    In theory, you should see the first of these crosses as a purple emoji and the second as a b/w cross ☦️️ ☦️︎ but I am not getting this reliably.
    John, the text in the last line appears to contain the character sequence <2626 FE0F FE0F 00A0 2626 FE0F FE0E>—i.e., you have an extra variation selector character FE0F after each occurrence of ☦, which is requesting "emoji" (colour) display.
  • George Thomas
    George Thomas Posts: 655
    U1F600 appears to be completely covered in the Noto Emoji fonts, five weights.

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,388
    edited May 25
    the text in the last line appears to contain the character sequence <2626 FE0F FE0F 00A0 2626 FE0F FE0E>
    That’s interesting. It means that the source I used to copy the emoji must have already included the U+FE0F after the symbol character.

    Let’s try again:

    U+2626 U+FE0F = ☦️
    U+2626 U+FE0E = ☦︎

    Looks better here.

    I presume this is going to rely on the font having a format 14 cmap table with appropriate Variant Selector sequences for all the emoji characters.

    Here is another test using one of the later emoji additions to Unicode (rather than an older symbol character that was later emojified):

    U+1F33F U+FE0F = 🌿️
    U+1F33F U+FE0E = 🌿︎

    Not getting a b/w variant here. I suspect support for the Variant Selectors might be more common for older symbol characters, which would be likely to exist in b/w form, which some fonts might only support newer emoji characters as colour.

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