dnf copr enable hadess/emoji dnf update cairo dnf install eosrei-emojione-fonts
Long version
A little while ago, I was reading this article, called "Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?", which said, and I reluctantly quote: "[...] and I don’t know what Linux does, but it’s probably black and white and who cares [...]".
Well. I care. And you probably do as well if your pizza slice above is black and white.
So I set out to check on the status of Behdad Esfahbod (or just "Behdad" as we know him)'s patches to add colour font support to cairo, which he presented at GUADEC in
It kind of worked, and Matthias Clasen reworked the patches a few times, completing the support. This is probably not the code that will be worked on and will land in cairo, but it's a good enough base for people interested in contributing to use.
After that, we needed something to display using that feature. We ended up using the same font recommended in this article, the Emoji One font.
There's still plenty to be done to support emojis, even after the cairo support is merged. We'd need a way to input emojis (maybe Lalo Martins is listening), and support in a lot of toolkits other than GNOME (Firefox only supports the SVG-in-OTF format, WebKit, Chrome, LibreOffice don't seem to know about colour fonts either).
You can find more information about design interests in GNOME around Emoji on the Wiki.
Update: Behdad's presentation was in Gothenburg, not Strasbourg. You can also see the video on YouTube.
