Apple Color Emoji for Linux

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

Disclaimer

The code provided is for educational purposes only. Apple is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Installing prebuilt AppleColorEmoji font

• Download the latest release of AppleColorEmoji.ttf at the Release Page
• Copy AppleColorEmoji.ttf to ~/.local/share/fonts.
• Rebuild the font cache with fc-cache -f -v.
• Now you are set!

Building AppleColorEmoji from source

• Install Python 2, building AppleColorEmoji.ttf currently requires a Python 2.x wide build.
• Install fonttools python package.
  • On the command line, enter: python -m pip install fonttools
• Install nototools python package.
  • On the command line, enter: python -m pip install https://github.com/googlefonts/nototools/archive/v0.2.1.tar.gz, or clone a copy from https://github.com/googlei18n/nototools and either put it in your PYTHONPATH or use python setup.py develop ('install' currently won't fully install all the data used by nototools).
• Install Optipng, Zopfli and Pngquant.
  • On RedHat based systems, run yum install optipng zopfli pngquant
  • Or on Fedora, run dnf install optipng zopfli pngquant
  • If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, you may run apt-get install optipng zopfli pngquant at the command line.
• Clone the source repository from Github
• Open a terminal or console prompt, change to the directory where you cloned apple-emoji-linux, and type make -j to build AppleColorEmoji.ttf from source.
• If you wish to install the built AppleColorEmoji.ttf to your system, execute make install,
• Then rebuild the your system font cache with fc-cache -f -v

Using AppleColorEmoji

AppleColorEmoji 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 Chome and Edge. On macOS, only Chrome supports it, while on Linux it will support it with some fontconfig tweaking.

Color emoji assets

The assets provided in the repo are all those used to build the AppleColorEmoji font. Note however that AppleColorEmoji 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.

Related

• Apple Color Emoji for Slack on Linux

Credits

• https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji
• https://github.com/googlei18n/nototools

License

• Emoji fonts (under the fonts subdirectory) are under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1.
• Tools and some image resources are under the Apache license, version 2.0.