View Apple Color Emoji: A Guide to Rendering and Installation

When it comes to rendering and installing color emojis on Windows systems, there are certain limitations and requirements that need to be met. One such example is the Noto Color Emoji font, which requires specific formatting and configuration to work properly.

For instance, GDI and GDI+ only support vector glyf outlines, not COLR, CBDT, or SVG tables. This means that when attempting to render color emojis using these formats, they may either not render at all or produce an error message.

In the case of Noto Color Emoji, testing in TextLayoutSampler revealed that only 'D2D DrawTextLayout' always renders the color glyphs properly. This is a significant finding, as it highlights the importance of specific rendering configurations when working with color emojis on Windows systems.

Furthermore, manually building a font for Noto Color Emoji can be done by adding a glyf table with empty glyphs, a loca table, and a cmap CMAP4 3/1 table. This modification makes the font installable and workable in Windows 10 (Home edition, version 20H2).

For those interested in testing the manually built Noto Color Emoji font, it can be found here. At least for as far as I could test, Paint 3D will use Noto Color Emoji for its emojis, but WordPad and Notepad will not apply Noto Color Emoji.

It's also worth noting that adding these modifications to the font will add approximately ~10KB to the file size, which is a reasonable increase given the overall file size of around ~10MB.

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