Still no Apple Color Emoji in Affinity Designer 1.9 release

[s5b]

Disappointed to see that Affinity Designer 1.9 has been released (which is great) and there is still no support for Apple Color Emoji text. This appears to be a fairly large omission from the product.

Is it really hard to implement? Or is it just not a priority? (It gets my vote as a priority item.)

Cheers,  S t u a r t .

[Guest]

Went to add an emoji in Publisher (and Designer)… and all I got was an empty space.

Bump +1. No colour fonts, no variable fonts, no emojis…… in a modern professional creative layout and design tool?!

[loukash]

… and until then, here's your quick workaround:

Don't know about newer MacOS versions – because I never use this infantile rubbish except for a few classic ASCII smilies here and there on the forum that automatically turn to these images: – but on El Capitan the emojis are low-res pixel images anyway. So if on newer MacOS they are more hi-res, simple create a bigger canvas in Preview to keep them scalable.

Oh, and the rectangle I made at the beginning is the global MacOS screenshot command "Copy picture of the selected area to the clipboard". Size and area doesn't matter whatsoever. But this is the fastest method to create a new blank Preview document which is what we need. Of course, you can also type and export emojis in any other app that supports them. But Preview is ubiquitous, so it's the first choice as an example.

[loukash]

P.S. I forgot that you can use the "Scale to: Pointsize/Cap height/etc." options in the Pinning panel to adjust the emoji size quickly to text size.

P.P.S. A Pinning panel in Designer?!
Yep. A nice easter egg, isn't it?

[loukash]

Turns out that at least up to High Sierra, the Apple emojis are only 160×160 px:

 

To extract them all as PNG in one go within a few minutes:

1. get FileJuicer (an essential tool that I bought some 15 years ago and all upgrades are still free)
2. juice: /System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttc (High Sierra location/font format)
3. inspect the created …/Juice/png folder
4. delete all thumbnail duplicates smaller than 160 px, should be 18912 items
5. enjoy your 2364 genuine High Sierra Apple Color Emojis as PNG

Newer MacOS will have more, but being on APFS partitions, I can't access them from El Capitan.

Drawback: no metadata or Unicode names. But the juiced sequence of images seems to match the font codepage character sequence, as seen e.g. in FontExplorer info window.

[RNKLN]

Or this (with the same 160x160 restriction): https://emoji.aranja.com

[kenmcd]

Bits'N'Picas, a free open source Java app, can be used to extract all the PNG images from the Apple Color Emoji font.

https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas

 

[chirurgean]

I agree. I have just made a template for A4 14 labels per page in Publisher - to replicate a label that I had created in Labelist (terrible program - crashes all the time)

Each label has text, emojis as bullet points and a QR code graphic. All was fine until I tried to insert an emoji - just a blank space/empty box where the emoji should be.

Come on Affinity! 2021 already! Even TextEdit can display emojis

 

I do appreciate the work arounds above, but life is too short to faff around 

[loukash]

12 minutes ago, chirurgean said:

Even TextEdit can display emojis

TextEdit uses Apple's built-in NSText framework.
Affinity apps don't.

19 minutes ago, chirurgean said:

life is too short to faff around

So your "alternative" is… sit around and wait until Serif finally updates their proprietary text framework?
(Don't get me wrong: Serif definitely should update it!)

[chirurgean]

I think that I will wait around 😝

See - emojis work in this forum!

I might even use the work arounds as noted above!

 

Best wishes & thanks for the tech explanation - at least I know why now

[The3Emran]

Is there a technical reason why full support has not been implemented for emojis in text tools....

I was about to post a feedback but it seems this has been an issue for quite a long time...