Implement emoji in Ubuntu

[nicolas]

This bug is about implementing emoji display and insertion in Ubuntu, desktop and phone.

I wrote a page about possible ways to implement emoji in Gnu/Linux systems:
http://probablement.net/txt/emojilinux

To sum it up:

* The first thing to do is having the Symbola font (in ttf-ancient-fonts) as part of the default installation, so users can see monochrome emoji. If I understand, it’s what is being done in bug #1137630 (which is about not seeing emoji: Symbola certainly resolve it but isn’t a full implementation of emoji as we expect them).

* The second thing is replacing Symbola with a proper colour emoji set, like Emoji One, Noto Color Emoji, or Twemoji. There’s different ways to implement this (layered colour font, SVG font, substitution with individual SVG files, …) but if I understand correctly comment #6 in #1137630 FreeType is already compatible with colour fonts! (I will update my page)

* An optional third step would be designing a custom Emoji set. That’s more or less bug #820034 even if I’m unsure about it being part of the Ubuntu Font Family, even if drawn in stylistically consistent way with it.

* Lastly, we need a system wide UI to browse, pick and insert emoji. I added some existing examples on the page; basically, the choice is making it only for emoji or part of larger UI for inserting characters.

[nicolas (nclmar)]

I found two more related bugs, both for Ubuntu Phone:
* #1269017 for both display and input, on mobile and not desktop, resolved with Symbola (like #1137630) and with #1340598.
* #1340598 which is for input, resolved by having a emoji keyboard on mobile! Great, it would be great to have something similar for desktop.

Recap of emoji-related bugs:
* #1439222 (desktop & phone) (display, input) (this one): full emoji experience: colour display, qualitative set, input UI. Unresolved.
* #1137630 (desktop & phone) (display): simple display of emoji. Resolved with Symbola.
* #1269017 (phone) (display, input): display and input for mobile. Resolved with Symbola and next bug.
* #1340598 (phone) (input): input for mobile. Resolved with an emoji keyboard.
* #820034: emoji set design for the Ubuntu Font Family. Unresolved.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Lalo Martins (lalo.martins)]

What about insertion on desktop, with a physical keyboard? I wrote my own solution which I'm more than happy to donate (https://github.com/lalomartins/ibus-uniemoji) but there might be a better solution.

[Lalo Martins (lalo.martins)]

Also I just spent about two hours testing whether colour fonts work on ubuntu 😾 seems they're not. Freetype might support them, but something else (fontconfig? gtk+qt?) doesn't; they don't show up in font selectors (e.g. in the Gimp), and opening one of those files in the font viewer causes a buggy window. Interestingly, Nautilus does display a couple of characters as a preview, although not in colour.

Should we make that a separate bug?

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

I don't care if people don't see them, I will still use them 😊

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Another solution seems to be http://emojione.com/

[Paul (sabret00the)]

Both other major operating systems support the display of coloured emoji on desktop. I would like to see Ubuntu maintain pace.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

This bug report lacks any steps to reproduce. So if you would like to see Ubuntu catch up, and you are not a font engineer, one thing you can do to help is to test and describe where the problems are, and ensure there is exactly one bug report for each of them.

For example, what happens if you copy emojione-android.ttf or NotoColorEmoji.ttf onto an Ubuntu phone, and then view a page that uses emoji? <http://emojipedia.org/unicode-8.0/> Are they rendered in color?

If so, do they also show up in color in other apps such as Dekko? If so, can you type them on the Emoji keyboard? If you can, all that’s required is packaging the font (ubuntu, tag=needs-packaging) and shipping it (ubuntu-touch-meta). If you can view them but not type them, it’s a matter of packaging, shipping, and also changing the keyboard (ubuntu-keyboard).

If the emoji aren’t rendered in color at all, can you find *any* multi-color font that works on Ubuntu, when used as a Web font for example? If you can, it’s four problems: packaging, shipping, typing, and font fallback (fontconfig).

If no multi-color font seems to work, then as Lalo suggested, the first problem is deeper, probably in Freetype (freetype). Report it with a simple test case. Once it’s fixed, re-test the other layers.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

(The above is focused on the phone. For PC the problems are the same, but as nicolas’s page says, with a character picker in place of the on-screen keyboard. That too needs a bug report to itself; it can be designed+implemented independently of all the other steps.)

[Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho (renatofilho)]

Looks like Qt has problems with colored emojis, check this bug[1], the fix for that[2] was merged some days ago. I will compile qt, and check if this fix the problem with "NotoColorEmoji.ttf" font.

[1]https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-45963
[2]https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/147429

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS includes color emoji support (with Google's Noto Color Emoji font). Most GTK apps are supported.

The GNOME Characters app allow you to browse emoji and is installed by default.

You can right-click in many text areas and choose Insert Emoji to get an embedded emoji browser when you want it.