Comment 10 for bug 1615575

Thanks for the quick response, Brad.

I agree, launchpad works quite well for us. There's not really much pressure to move away, currently. Also, I feel, as long as Onboard is installed by default in Ubuntu, we should stay close. The situation may change with unity 8, we'll see.

> I've always expected support for CBLC/CBDT color format fonts
> in Linux before SVGinOT.
Seems you were right, there's support for (what I believe is) Google's CBLC/CBDT in freetype. I got this example here
https://gist.github.com/jokertarot/7583938
to render colored emoji from your emojione-android.ttf.
That could be a possible path forward. Don't know if this is accessible from anywhere higher in the stack.

For SVGinOT there's just this bug report:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?46141

I'd still prefer SVG over png for Onboard, though, because most of the UI is freely scalable. All the other images we use as key labels are SVG too.

> An option for now is to add emoji support using the existing
> font rendering system.
That's what we currently do, yes. If there's no reasonable way to get color, we'll just wait for better times.

> Both of my fonts provide regular fallback non-color glyphs.
I've seen that the fonts-emojione Ubuntu package has gray-scale glyphs. Is that a special version of your font or a fallback? They render fine in Onboard, btw.