Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 —The Future of Color Fonts?

winemoji

With Windows 8.1, Microsoft’s operating system now also supports color emoji. But they did it in a very different way than Apple and Google. Instead of using PNG images, they introduced a support for layered vector glyphs!

Reminds of that neat trick where one would layer webfonts/icofonts on top of eachother, all in a different color (e.g. Forecast Font).

Best thing above all about the technology: it’s backwards compatible.

Color Emoji in Windows 8.1 —The Future of Color Fonts? →

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

Join the Conversation

2 Comments

  1. The way Microsoft has done this is brilliant, much, MUCH more intelligent than the way Apple has, although they like their cutesy skeumorphism too much to implement something so clean as this. The brilliance is the backwards compatibility, and that any font designer can now create coloured fonts that work in any application using DirectWrite. Hopefully Apple will add this to ATSUI.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.