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Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

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Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#21
I enjoyed this thorough breakdown of the different technologies. "Colorful typography on the web: get ready for multicolor fonts" http://www.pixelambacht.nl/2014/multicolor-fonts/

In particular, it expands on the details behind Adobe/Mozilla's SVG approach, as well as browser support.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#23

Seems neat, and I appreciate the forward-thinking mentality. But, as far as I am aware, emoji are a fad and won't really stand the test of time anyway. Either way, I guess, it's nice to see these easy-to-use, easy-to-create principals in play.

A few seem to be really missing the point of this article, which has little to do with emoji itself. TLDR; MS's approach to implementing a color emoji font could lead to a very useable color font format. EDIT: typos

I think I addressed that in my comment. The article is a little about emoji, and I addressed that too.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so too, until I started using them in my messages to my friends and girlfriend. Now I find them an integral part of my communications. 😄

Oh the irony. Your emoji comes out as a blank square for me (Windows 7 - Opera 12)

Chrome does the blank square as well, but it works in Firefox and IE. (win7)

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#25
post #2

My phone has color emoji. Facebook has color emoji. Am I missing something?

You obviously didn't read the article. This solution is totally different, building up the color emoji using a cool font table approach. You should read it; it's worth the time. :)

Actually it is a pretty dirty hack -- it seems ok because the flat design is currently popular. But quite likely gradients and shadows will come back in a few years and then few single-color layers won't be enough.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously didn't read the article. This solution is totally different, building up the color emoji using a cool font table approach. You should read it; it's worth the time. :)

Actually it is a pretty dirty hack -- it seems ok because the flat design is currently popular. But quite likely gradients and shadows will come back in a few years and then few single-color layers won't be enough.

You could build gradients with this, but it wouldn't look nice zoomed in. And, importantly, Apple's current gradient-filled font wouldn't work!

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#27
post #7

I must be getting old because I hate these things. They're the blink tag on steroids.

The main point of the article has nothing to do with emoji. MS's approach to implementing emoji however could lead to a very useable color font format. Read it.

the main point of the article is that these awful things are spreading like herpes.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh the irony. Your emoji comes out as a blank square for me (Windows 7 - Opera 12)

Chrome does the blank square as well, but it works in Firefox and IE. (win7)

Works for me in FF on Linux.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#29
It's not "the future of color fonts", it's just the present of emoji in Windows. And I really don't like the way they did this.

The technical approach is smart, but lazy, and the resulting emoji look bland and lack definition. No wonder, since this approach doesn't support the way artists work. It's not SVG, it's not PostScript, it's not a bitmap, it's just a glyph sandwich. No opacity, no gradients, no effects. It must be a pain to split your pictures in layers so they can be in a font like that.

As far as using this for text... the novelty of such effects faded out sometime in the 90s when Word Art was all the rage among design-blind office workers.

In the modern world of Unicode, it's even less likely we'll start making fonts with hardcoded layers of cheesy effects when you need to cover a good range of international characters, weights, cursive, hints, kern pairs, ligatures, alternate versions and so on.

Re: Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts?

#30
post #5

These look really cool as does the technology, but I don't think I've ever used Emoji past a couple of ASCII smilies. My Android handset seems to have them but I don't use them and neither does anyone else I know. Is this a cultural thing I'm missing?

I think it's a lot more useful if you have a layer of inderection on the input. I.e. what you type goes through autocomplete or an IME before being sent to the application you type into. It eases the need to switch to a different keyboard altogether just to input emoji, you just type "heart" and choose from the candidates.

That's a reason it is so heavily used in Japan, where they already have a two layer input system anyway. We might also have it easier and easier in ascii based languages as autocomplete like features develop and become ubiquitous.

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