Searching for a vector-based emoji font

Joshua Langman
Joshua Langman Posts: 98
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: 777
    Try Symbola or DejaVu Sans.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,457
    https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/blob/master/assets/svg/1f3af.svg
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 98
    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: 98
    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: 252
    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: 3,396
    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: 98
    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: 3,396
    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: 3,396
    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: 368
    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: 252
    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: 3,396
    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.
  • Khaled Hosny
    Khaled Hosny Posts: 299
    edited May 26
    Emoji presentation is usually handled by applications at font fallback stage. If a character has an Emoji presentation, applications will use a color font for this character (or specifically a color emoji font), if a character has a text presentation, then a non-color font will be used. This includes consuming the variation selectors to override the default presentation.
    This means the font never sees the emoji presentation variation selectors.  As far as I know, no emoji font includes a format 14 cmap subtable to switch between color and non-color versions of the glyphs. Available emoji fonts are either color fonts or not.

  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 252
    @John Hudson Here's what I see in your post in Edge on Windows 11 24H2:
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 65
    Probably depends upon OS
    the same page shows differently in Google chrome (version 136)  in Ubuntu and Android 
    In Ubuntu
     
    In Android 

  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 252
    Khaled Hosny said:
    Emoji presentation is usually handled by applications at font fallback stage... This includes consuming the selectors to override the default presentation.
    That's not always the case. It certainly would make font selection and fallback a lot more complicated. In Windows, DWrite APIs aren't designed with that flow in mind. In particular, the TranslateColorGlyphRun method assumes that the presentation mode is being determined after shaping / layout. See Color font support for more info.

    As far as I know, no emoji font includes a format 14 cmap subtable to switch between color and non-color versions of the glyphs. Available emoji fonts are either color fonts or not.

    Segoe UI Emoji—both the earlier COLRv0 version and the current COLRv1 version—support both B/W and colour, and have a format 14 cmap subtable.
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,455
    I drew most of the emoji characters in the initial proposal and a couple of the updates.  https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 368
    So the Symbola font author copied your emoji (and apparently other people's work) and is selling it for thousands of dollars? That's weird to say the least.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 98
    I was going to mention that it looked to me like various character sets within Symbola were either lifted directly from other published fonts or else copied very closely. Do we know anything about the pedigree of this font? I'll respond to other comments here soon.
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 65
    edited May 28
    As per GitHub site https://github.com/zhm/symbola the symbola font is created using public domain svg and is freeware. How can some company charge $15000 for that?
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,396
    @mitradranirban That is a different project under the same name.
  • Thomas Linard
    Thomas Linard Posts: 19
    Jens Kutilek said:
    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)
    It was, and in fact https://dn-works.com/ufas/ leads to https://dn-works.com/wp-content/uploads/UFAS/License.pdf which explicitly states: 

    user:
    refers to anyone who downloads ufas [Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts] from this, or any other, site;
    may use ufas for strictly personal and non-commercial purposes, without charge;

    But the font files are no longer available (for Symbola, the last free version was 14.00).

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