hfg-gmuend/openmoji

Improve Black Font Contours

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#433 opened on Jan 14, 2023

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Description

This is a followup to some of the side-discussion from #93

After #422, the quality of the fonts is vastly improved. And the black font in particular now uses a near-universally supported format. Fantastic!

But the fonts still are not perfect. I've generated a table for visually inspecting all the glyphs. The comparison table can be found here: https://robertwinslow.github.io/openmoji/font/black-font-comparison-table

Preview:

Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 11 17 28 AM

The first column contains the 72x72 PNG image of the glyph. The second column displays the character using the official black glyf font generated using NanoEmoji. The third column displays the glyph using an alternate version of the font, built using FontForge's (v20220308) importOutlines scripting functionality.

Here's an (atypical but striking) example demonstrating that neither contour generation method has results exactly as desired: Screen Shot 2023-01-14 at 11 30 02 AM

In some cases, these imperfect contours may be the unavoidable result of bugs in the tools used to create them. In other cases, they may indicate fixable problems in the source SVG files.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
None
Domain
designtooling
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
4
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
mostly clear
Prerequisites
Understanding of SVGFamiliarity with font generation tools
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30
Research direction
Compare the glyph contours from NanoEmoji and FontForge using the provided comparison table. Identify which glyphs show imperfections and determine whether the issue lies in the source SVG files or the font generation tools. Reference previous work in PR #422 and discussion in issue #93. Consider testing fixes on a small subset of glyphs before scaling.