Noto Emoji

Color and Black-and-White Noto emoji fonts, and tools for working with them.

Prerequisites

Building Noto Color Emoji requires:

• Python 3
• pkg-config
• pngquant
• zopflipng
• cairo
• imagemagick

Building NotoColorEmoji

This project uses a virtual environment to manage dependencies. Use the following steps to get up and running:

# make sure you have the Prerequisites

# create & activate a virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

# install python requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

time make -j

Intermediate products (compressed image files, for example) will be put into a build subdirectory. Two fonts will be saved at the top level:

• NotoColorEmoji.ttf, for general use.
• NotoColorEmoji_WindowsCompatible.ttf, which is the same font but with an additional empty glyf table and cmap format 4 subtable. This is required by Windows 10 if you want to install the font.

Using NotoColorEmoji

NotoColorEmoji uses the CBDT/CBLC color font format, which is supported by Android and Chrome/Chromium OS. Windows supports it starting with Windows 10 Anniversary Update in Chrome and Edge. On macOS, only Chrome supports it, while on Linux it will support it with some fontconfig tweaking, see issue #36. Currently we do not build other color font formats.

Color emoji assets

The assets provided in the repo are all those used to build the NotoColorEmoji font. Note however that NotoColorEmoji often uses the same assets to represent different character sequences-- notably, most gender-neutral characters or sequences are represented using assets named after one of the gendered sequences. This means that some sequences appear to be missing. Definitions of the aliasing used appear in the emoji_aliases.txt file.

Also note that the images in the font might differ from the original assets. In particular the flag images in the font are PNG images to which transforms have been applied to standardize the size and generate the wave and border shadow. We do not have SVG versions that reflect these transforms.

B/W emoji font

The black-and-white emoji font is not under active development. Its repertoire of emoji is now several years old, and the design does not reflect the current color emoji design. Currently we have no plans to update this font.

License

Emoji fonts (under the fonts subdirectory) are under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1.
Tools and most image resources are under the Apache license, version 2.0. Flag images under third_party/region-flags are in the public domain or otherwise exempt from copyright (more info).

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING if you are thinking of contributing to this project.

News

• 2017-09-13: Emoji redesign released.
• 2015-12-09: Unicode 7 and 8 emoji image data (.png format) added.
• 2015-09-29: All Noto fonts now licensed under the SIL Open Font License.