Preload Noto Emoji font

[jt15s]

To be able to support emoji "out of the box", it is a good idea to consider preloading the Noto Emoji TTF font. The font itself is 409KB (called "NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf), so it wouldn't result in a big increase in terms of file size for fonts we preload.

[X512]

Please don't make it a dependency of Haiku package and make it removable. I don't want it.

[nephele]

Yeah, if it is included it should only be so in release images IMO. I have done a bit more checking and it seems that among other things dejavu sans includes some emoji glyphs aswell, maybe with a "generic" font fallback this would be much less of a problem.

(Also noto emoji includes ascii chars for no reason yet again, do we really need so many useless copies of ascii chars? Surely these are in the font to trick some broken parser on some OS?)

[pulkomandy]

Just o clarify, this is about Noto Emoji which uses traditional monochrome characters. We will not include Noto Color Emoji which does colorful things (we can't display these with our current implementation anyway).

I think the monochrome version is acceptable as default.

As for dependencies, currently the font fallback is hardcoding specific fonts, so there is a dependency. We can remove it when the font fallback is improved and it will manage to find fallbacks on its own. Maybe we can consider removing the dependencies now that the font fallback at least manages to display a "missing glyph" character and not corrupt the whole string. That's acceptable fallback when the fonts are not available.

[n0toose]

Should this marked as an "optional package" in the Installer?

[n0toose]

Related ticket: https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/9581

[nephele]

No. an emoji font is required for proper operation on this day and age, and it's tiny really so the size argument doesn't even come into play. We should probably just add it now.

Not sure how that other ticket is related to emoji?

[n0toose]

Understood, I thought that it was related because a similar problem of "Oh, hey, I may not want that on my system" alongside with a proposed solution of the package being optional during the installation process was brought up. I'm not that big into them, but I agree that the ability to display emojis is a must.

[nephele]

Yeah, pulkomandy brought up above that we currently do indeed depend on this specific font, so while choice is nice unless someone redoes the font fallback code we do depend on this one and installing a different one wouldn't work unless you explicity (or an app) sets it as system font and everything that isnt emoji falls back. :)

[n0toose]

I created a pull request in the Haikuports repository to update the font in question to its latest version: ​https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/pull/7879

[nephele]

I've iterated on the PR. The resulting package is about 4MB big, definetely small enough to add to the image. It also has all the weights, and it falls back fine :)

I don't know how the variable weight support works though, something for another time. Would be interesting to support also