Looking for a ttf font with emoticon support

Fonts and More General Font Discussions
1

Hello,
i am looking for a ttf font that includes the standard characters as well as a set of smileys.
I want to use it on a BlackBerry device, i can install custom fonts but the newer unicode specifications are not supported.

Currently i am using bitmaps mixed with a standard font, but this approach leads to many problems which were, so far, not solvable for me.

I have found a font called DroidSansFallback.ttf, but it is much too large. Is it possible to extract some characters to create an own font?
Never touched this area before, don’t hesitate to give me beginner tips :slight_smile:

2

Take a look at Quivira

Alan Wood’s Pages are a useful site to bookmark.

3

Thanks for the reply, the used smileys look quite good.
Would it be possible to create a ttf with only the emoticons and the normal latin characters (ascii)?
If yes, what tools would i need to accomplish this?

4

FontCreator Home Edition is OK if your font is intended for private use, if its for Commercial use you need the Professional Edition.

Then if the license conditions of the font allow, you can easily delete any unwanted characters to create a version with just the desired characters.

5

Welcome to the forum.

In relation to emoticons there is a situation of which you need to be aware.

Various manufacturers of mobile telephones started using emoticons using Unicode Private Use Area mappings of their own.

The Unicode emoticon codepoint allocations were added to Unicode later.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

In finding out about emoticons and Unicode, it is a good idea to search for emoji as emoticons were encoded along with emoji and could be considered as part of the emoji repertoire.

Now, I have no experience of a BlackBerry device, so I do not know anything about the following, yet I feel that there are two questions to which I would need to know answers in order to try to use emoticons on a BlackBerry device.

The first question is as follows.

Will a BlackBerry device support Unicode characters from plane 1?

The thing is, some devices may only support plane 0 Unicode, not plane 1 or above. If the BlackBerry does not support plane 1, then it cannot be used with the plane 1 Unicode codes for emoticons. That would imply the need for a Private Use Area encoding.

The second question is as follows.

Are emoticons already being used on a BlackBerry device, whether with or without manufacturer support, and if so, with what encoding?

You might find the following of interest.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/emoji/1738/36

There is a link to a document that was used when Unicode was encoding emoticons.

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/emojidata.pdf

It includes details of the plane 0 encodings used by various mobile telephone companies.

The thing is, with a font, one designs a collection of image glyphs and then, in order for those image glyphs to be used by applications, one needs to map each one of them to a Unicode codepoint, the same Unicode codepoint used by the applications. For many things, such as accented characters for French, that is straightforward as the code point can be found in a Unicode code chart. Maybe from some day in the future that will be true for emoticons as well. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this post, it is not: there is a Unicode code chart to help guide towards a standardized goal and that code chart may well be the codes used by some applications. Yet for others, such as some mobile telephones, it is not. It is a bit of an unfortunate muddle at times.

I hope that this helps.

William Overington

1 June 2011