Early 2019 Plans

macOS' Font Book, showing my collection of fonts that are installed for this user. The current selected font is a Mutant Standard test font, the demo pane of the window showing the transgender flag and hot shit emoji.
(Don’t mind the glitches on the window, my Hackintosh has been having problems lately. -_-)

Hey! After some research, I managed to (semi) successfully manually compile a Mutant Standard emoji font. This is really exciting!

This was a small test to test my (still incomplete) research though – it only contains two emoji. Like how orxporter recolours and exports thousands of emoji, we need software that can process and put thousands of emoji into a font.

kiilas and I have been talking, and we’re going to work to make fonts in the release after the one I’m working on now.

So with that in mind, I thought I would give a general outline of what we plan to accomplish in the next few months!

A lot of these new updates are heavily related to our emoji production technology, and the new tech will be released to coincide with each new release, so I will list alongside each of these Mutant Standard release in this timeline.

 

A dark gray vertical timeline on an acid yellow background. January 2019: Mutant Standard 0.3.2 (Text descriptions and translation docs), Orxporter 0.2.0. March 2019: Mutant Standard 0.4.0 (fonts, web emoji picker, desktop support), Orxporter 0.3.0, Untitled font library. Later: Font installation for mobile devices, research into providing text descriptions for fonts.

January 2019

Mutant Standard 0.3.2

This will probably be a smaller release as I’m doing lots of important font research and experiments right now that’s instrumental for what kiilas does with creating an emoji font encoder.

  • More animal emoji
  • Partial/full text descriptions (depending on how things go)
  • Translation docs in the build repo

orxporter 0.2.0

  • Much faster PNG render performance (up to 16x in tests)
  • Choice of PNG renderers
  • More open to open source collaboration, introduction of a repo CoC

 

March 2019

So after Mutant Standard 0.3.2 is where the preparation and development will take place to create fully-functioning Mutant Standard fonts, alongside the planned for release in March.

Keep in mind that this will be a start, because getting fonts made in the first place and getting the website ready will be a lot. There’s still more that needs to be done with fonts after this point.

Mutant Standard 0.4.0

  • Fonts compatible with lots of popular software
    • Windows 10, macOS 10.7+, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS+
    • Firefox 50+, Thunderbird, Edge 37+
    • Technically compatible with iOS 2.2+ and Android 4.4+ but we probably won’t have the time to provide installation support for mobile devices inĀ this release.
  • New downloads page
    • Support and installation instructions for fonts for desktop.
  • A basic emoji picker website for the fonts.
  • Full text descriptions (if they weren’t completed by 0.3.2)
  • More emoji if I get the time!

orxporter 0.3.0

  • Added ability to compile emoji sets into fonts using a new untitled font library (mentioned below!).

Untitled font library

Instead of incorporating font encoding functionality directly within orxporter, we’re going to make that as a separate library that orxporter will use. This way, people can benefit from this font encoding software without being forced to use orxporter.

We plan for this to support SVGinOT, sbix and CBDT/CBLC formats. We probably won’t provide support for COLR/CPAL, because it will probably be very difficult to compile that kind of data from SVG and it has limited OS support.

 

Later

  • Font installation support for mobile devices.
  • Research to see if we can provide OS text descriptions of Mutant Standard PUA codepoints so screen readers can read Mutant Standard fonts. At the moment, without OS text descriptions, these fonts will not be usable to the visually impaired (we will be placing a clear warning alongside 0.4.0 fonts, indicating these fonts should not be used around the visually impaired.)
  • More emoji and more encodings as always!

 

 

 

We wouldn’t have made it this far without the support of awesome people on Patreon. The more donations this project gets, the more time we can spend on this project and the more we can do! And thanks to everyone who has been supporting this project besides!