How does the Apple color emoji font work, and is there an Android version?

android iphone fonts true-type-fonts emoji
Developer picture Developer · Mar 2, 2012 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I saw that on iPhone there is a truetype font called Apple Color Emoji. It contains the emoticons that exist on iPhones which can be used in any application.

I wonder:

  1. How is this font displayed in multicolor?! Truetype fonts can only include black and white glyphs.
  2. Can this font, or one like it, be used on Android phones?

Answer

natevw picture natevw · Apr 5, 2012

Apple is using a proprietary extension to the OpenType standard. Basically, they just store pre-rasterized color PNGs in a proprietary extension "block" within the TTF file (reference, corroboration).

The only reason this works is because they also provide the full stack between that font extension and the screen (font rasterization, system graphics library, text rendering widgets). There's no standardized way to accomplish this across all platforms/libraries.

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