(This is a mirror of the Patreon post of the same name because I realised that relying on Patreon is a bad idea but I didn’t wanna delete that post either)
Hey, I’m starting to get into emoji making some more again, it’s still really hard and exhausting after my burnout in November, but I wanna slowly get back into stuff.
Fonts have been a much-requested feature for Mutant Standard. The trouble for us is that it’s not a particularly easy or quick thing to get into.
Font encoding is an old and complicated system, much of which isn’t really relevant to emoji, but they have to be made nonetheless. There are numerous emoji font formats we have to account for because there’s no one single popular emoji format. There are no easy pre-made solutions to building emoji font sets. Out of the free font tools that do exist, they either don’t support emoji font encoding, don’t work, or they are undocumented and impenetrable.
I really felt like dipping into this somehow in the last week and kiilas and I have been talking about it as something we could try to work on at this point. We’ve decided that making a bespoke font encoder would be best given the options out there, and to make it a separate library that Orxporter can plug into so anyone can benefit from a more accessible emoji font encoding library.
So to start this emoji encoding library situation, I’m starting with research on font encoding, what’s necessary for encoding an emoji set and how this can be streamlined as much as possible. You can see my current notes here.
I’ll keep working on my research over the next few days and then programming will start! This will probably delay 0.3.2 more, but I hope you’ll agree that making real progress on fonts will be worth it ^^.
Thank you for all your support, and I hope we can finally get fonts made in the near-future!
💚