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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

I feel for the artists whose job it is to draw and organize nearly 4000 little vector images, most of which will barely ever be used to communicate anything.

I'm going to imagine that it's functionally impossible to make a font with full emoji support now unless you're a massive corporation. (Not that it's an issue really, but there's only so far you can push the list of required code points right? You can leave off entire character sets if they aren't used in the target language you produce a font for. On the other hand, leaving off the head shaking emojis is going to be unforgivable for a lot of people that feel like they're being left out because of their phone OS choice or something.)

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Actually, once you're going to support CJKV languages, and especially more than one of those at the same time, the idea of single font for single document just goes out of window. It already is out of window, just you don't notice it unless you have CJKV users or literacy.

The way it has to work is <english> part of sentences must be rendered in an English font</english>, <chinese-simplified>requires own appropriate font inline</chinese-simplified> and <chinese-traditional>part requires another appropriate font, because there are no distinction in the text binary between Simplified Chinese,</chinese-traditional>, <Japanese>and any other Chinese language variants</Japanese>.

What this has to do with emoji is, same is going on with emoji; emoji is own "language", and the way it has to be and it is supported right now is by switching fonts and calling whoever default and/or can supply missing characters in-line and per-character.

Well, maybe the ship still is on domestic waters on CJKV because there are conspicuous reserved areas in Unicode assignments to hold all CsCtJKV(?) symbols separately, but for emojis it has.

That's true! I know that, it's the reason why every OS has its own well known style of emoji. The fonts people use day-to-day don't cover the emoji characters so it falls back to whatever massive default font is installed.

Just thinking that wall is getting higher every time they add new emoji or new ZWJ sequences that exponentially grow the number of glyphs. Even the base emoji set (should you want to make your own emoji-only font) is bigger than many single-character set fonts. (But not all, clearly)

For their phone keyboard "Gboard", Google made around 30.000(!) emoji combinations available as stickers. Here is an overview:

https://emoji.supply/kitchen/

These are all handcrafted, and some are quite original, e.g. when you combine one with itself. An entire team of artists must have worked on this for quite some time.

So far I've found 88 combos involving the poop emoji.

Photos album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/wCNxKjzi61rCJUsU8

I mean, the Chinese language has 106,230 characters [1]. This is not a new issue. And it actually sounds fun, at least they are drawings and not just various organizations of black lines

[1] https://chinainternshipplacements.com/blog/how-many-chinese-...

Yeah that's a good point. But I think there's also more complete (all code spaces filled) latin fonts than CJK fonts for that reason.

It's off topic, but you might find it interesting. There's Japanese kanji glyphs that only exist because of (presumably) transcription errors while specifying the code pages in unicode. [0] Gives a sense of how massive that code block is!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17637375

Hanzi are compounds of a smaller subset of repeating shapes, though.

On the contrary, I think it must be really cool to design something that millions of people will see and use to express emotions. Even the lesser-used emojis still likely get millions of uses.

On Twitter alone, the lowest used emojis still get a ton of use: https://emojitracker.com/

How about with a maximum size of 10x10 pixels?

https://emoji.serenityos.net/

I feel this would be something where AI generated could be useful. Is there a midjourney for emojis?

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