
Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 – The Future of Color Fonts? - sanqui
http://opentype.info/blog/2013/07/03/color-emoji-in-windows-8-1-the-future-of-color-fonts/
======
cordite
Having both a color-unaware and color-aware versions can be really useful.

Printing for example would retain the meaning without a gray-scaled rendition
losing the details to understand what the symbol might be. (This is just a
guess, not an assertion that black-and-white symbols would be used in this
context.)

From an accessibility standpoint, consider situations where high-contrast (and
or size) is necessary, and it is perfectly legitimate to throw out or ignore
the text and background colors for such users.

This solution seems to best satisfy comprehension needs for disabled users as
well as printers--not that we need to print the bible translated to emoji any
time soon.

------
tiles
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/](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.

------
dispense
I can't read this article without allowing Javascript.

~~~
hrjet
That is true for about 50% of the links posted here these days. I usually just
close the tab and read the comments on HN.

Note to site designers: something is terribly wrong if JS is needed to render
the main textual content of your site.

~~~
lucian1900
Or just get with the program and allow JS. It's not going away, as flawed a
language as it is.

Web browsers are an execution environment, no longer just document viewers.

~~~
rlpb
> Web browsers are an execution environment, no longer just document viewers.

Indeed they are. But there is a real duality here. On HN, I see links to both
applications and documents. Both of them happen to be HTTP links, since the
web supports both.

I am mostly interested in the documents.

If you have a document to present, perhaps you should present it as a
document, instead of requiring users to run your application to present your
document?

~~~
lenkite
If you want a _responsive_ document that scales to all different screen sizes,
_modern_ touch-sensitive navigation for the content of this document, view-
able on all the cornucopia of mobile and desktop browsers today then you need
to use JS. Yes, maybe one in ten thousand web devs are the CSS master-wizards
who can find a declarative way to do everything everywhere on any browser but
it usually takes 10x the effort. Simpler to just use tested JS libraries

~~~
spain
This seems pretty responsive to me:

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

>This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi.

~~~
rayiner
That link is the best thing that's ever happened to the internet.

------
AshleysBrain
I think this is a great implementation. Embedding PNGs in to a font feels
wrong - surely that doesn't scale up to large font sizes well? Or causes a
blurry/pixellated downscaled image? Mixing bitmap with vector seems an odd
engineering decision. Microsoft's approach is elegant in maintaining backwards
compatibility and also enabling colored vector images on top.

The only downside seems to be a limited color palette, but I don't think that
outweighs the benefits, and also encourages a clear and simple design.

------
pling
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?

~~~
aneisf
Yeah, they're wildly popular with just about everyone I know 25 and under,
especially on sites like Instagram. There's even been a music video created
from them:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlJveN9IkI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmlJveN9IkI)

~~~
pling
Ok thanks. That's well under my age so I understand. Does it replace "TXT SPK"
which I'm still too old to use and find terribly annoying?

(I'm sounding like a right grumpy old git here)

~~~
aneisf
That sort of hyper-abbreviated writing has largely disappeared thanks to
spell-check, predictive autocomplete, and so forth.

Emoji can certainly stand in for text, and I see plenty of comments and text
messages that consist primarily of emoji. But just as often they will
accompany text to add personality or mood the way ASCII smilies or textual
kaomoji always have on bulletin boards.

~~~
wyager
>That sort of hyper-abbreviated writing has largely disappeared thanks to
spell-check, predictive autocomplete, and so forth

Now that I think about it, you're completely write. It's been years since I've
seen text-speak.

~~~
Aeolus98
I think right autocompleted to write for you there.

------
asgard1024
This is offtopic, but I really miss emoji for "shrug" \- expression of I don't
know and I don't care. They should add something like that to Unicode.

~~~
dagurp
¯\\(°_o)/¯

------
tyrionaura
I still have the feeling that emojis in general are an unsolved problem,
especially on iOS, where it takes so much time to find a proper "character".

------
lmm
I've seen browsers use a colour font for e.g. mahjong tiles (🀄) already; was
that a different implementation, or what?

------
ryansouza
This reminds me of the customizable shape avatars, like from Halo 2

------
PeterGriffin
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.

~~~
derefr
> 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.

Well thank god. What you call "opacity, gradients, and effects", I call "total
inability to be bolded, colored, embossed, etc." Apple's and Google's emoji
basically entirely ignore CSS in favor of looking, well, exactly the way they
look. Styling emoji to actually fit your site's theme? Who'd have imagined?

~~~
PeterGriffin
You seem so passionate about this, it hurts to break your heart.

When you set your text to be bold, that's a _separate font_ , made by a human
hand.

Browsers have a fake bold look when the font is missing, but it's not a look
you want on your site. They just, well... smudge it to the right. For Emoji
the fake bold look is disabled, because _bold or italic emoji_ is just non-
sense on the face of it, so they don't support weight settings.

Also, you can't set the color of Windows Emoji via CSS. _They 're already
colored_.

~~~
kevingadd
The design of the windows approach to colored fonts actually has affordances
for recoloring the text. It's not implemented, but it's mentioned in overviews
of the format.

Because the colored glyphs use a palette instead of hard-coded colors, it's
possible to assign semantic meanings or names to each palette entry and remap
them. This would enable you to render a 'high contrast' version, or adjust the
primary color of an emoji (for example, changing the skin tone of a face),
etc.

The latter is actually a topic of concern: Most current emoji represent a
caucasian or light-skinned individual, so the lack of emojis that represent
other races is a problem. People are still figuring out how to deal with it.

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

~~~
wubbfindel
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.

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

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

~~~
jeremymcanally
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. :)

~~~
mbq
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.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
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!

------
deaconblues
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.

~~~
Synaesthesia
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. 😄

~~~
ranran876
Oh the irony. Your emoji comes out as a blank square for me (Windows 7 - Opera
12)

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

~~~
heinrich5991
Works for me in FF on Linux.

