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-webfonts and an additional node.js script. Therefore, installation of Node.js (and its package manager npm) is a prerequisite. Grunt will be installed as a package dependency — no need to install it globally.

The necessary tools can be installed via npm:

# install dependencies from packages.json, including `grunt-webfonts`.
npm install

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.

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 install fonttools fontforge python3-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.