Font with Emoji support for PDF export

[mflorea]

Hi,

While investigating Loading... I discovered that the GNU FreeFont font we bundle for PDF export don’t support Emojis. As a result they are rendered as ‘#’ in PDF. We need to fix this quickly because the WYSIWYG editor allows you to insert Emojis so the users will start to complain. We don’t have to bundle an entire new font. We could simply bundle only the Emoji subset and add the font to the list of fallback.

I’ve tested Google’s Noto Emoji font and the monochrome version is light (~300KB) so it won’t increase the size of the XWiki WAR that much. The colored version is 6.8MB. I think the monochrome version is enough. We can document how to add the colored version.

Do you know better alternatives to Noto Emoji? Anyone against adding it to the XWiki WAR?

Thanks,
Marius

[vmassol]

@mflorea

We don’t have to bundle an entire new font. We could simply bundle only the Emoji subset and add the font to the list of fallback.

Sounds interesting.

Now maybe the Noto Emoji font is better than the font we bundle already and it would be interesting to replace the one we bundle with it completely?

[tmortagne]

@vmassol

Now maybe the Noto Emoji font is better than the font we bundle already and it would be interesting to replace the one we bundle with it completely?

Noto sure is more complete than FreeFont but it’s 1.1GB.

@mflorea

I’ve tested Google’s Noto Emoji font and the monochrome version is light (~300KB) so it won’t increase the size of the XWiki WAR that much. The colored version is 6.8MB. I think the monochrome version is enough. We can document how to add the colored version.

+1 for embedding the Noto Emoji monochrome quickly for now, we can always rediscuss that later if someone propose an alternative

[mflorea]

I bundled the monochrome Noto Emoji for now in order to have the issue fixed in 12.2 and 11.10.4. We can change this later if we want.