Blog backlog, Post 1, Emoji

Short version

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 Strasbourg Gothenburg. It adds support for the "bitmap in font" as Android does, and as freetype supports.

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.

Contents Apps Hackfest 2015

As you might already have noticed from the posts on Planet GNOME, and can find again on the hackfest's page, we spent some time in the MediaLab Prado discussing and hacking on Content Apps.

Music

Following discussions about Music's state, I did my bit trying to gather more contributors by porting it to grilo 0.3, and thus bringing it back into the default jhbuild target.

Videos

I made some progress on Videos' "series grouping" feature. Loads of backend code written, but not much in the way of UI for now. We however made some progress discussing said UI with Allan.

I also took the opportunity to fix a few low-hanging fruit^Wbugs.

Documents

This is where the majority of my energy went. After getting a new enough version of LibreOffice going on my machine (Fedora users, that lives in rawhide only right), no thanks to COPR, I tested Pranav's LibreOfficeKit integration into gnome-documents, after Cosimo rebased it.

You can test it now by checking out the wip/lokdocview-rebase branch of gnome-documents, grabbing the above mentioned version of LibreOffice, and running:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/  gjs org.gnome.Documents

After a number of fixes, and bugs filed in the Document Foundation bugzilla, we should be able to land this so that you can preview and edit word processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets without going through the heavy PDF preview.

A picture, which doubles the length of my blog post

And the side-effect of this work is that we can start adding new "views" to the application without too much trouble, like, say, an epub view.

Thanks

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel, the MediaLab Prado for hosting us, and Allan and Florian for organising the hackfest.