1391715 - Implement support for EmojiCompat on Android

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Alexandre Folle de Menezes]

There's now a new API on Android that enables any device with Adroid >= 4.4 to show the latest Emoji:
https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/support-library/preview/emoji-compat.html

Implementing this would improve Emoji support and enable dropping the Emoji font, reducing the APK size.

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

At first glance, this looks like it is a component for Java apps, so may not be readily applicable to Gecko.

Comment 2

[Alexandre Folle de Menezes]

I am not familiar with the native API, but there are many ways to interact with the new font service:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/downloadable-fonts.html

There seems to be a ways to request fonts via the manifest.  Isn't that applicable?

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

(In reply to Alexandre Folle de Menezes from comment #2)
> I am not familiar with the native API, but there are many ways to interact
> with the new font service:
> https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/downloadable-
> fonts.html
> 
> There seems to be a ways to request fonts via the manifest.  Isn't that
> applicable?

Maybe; I don't really know anything about the Android APIs involved here. It's not clear to me that this is using a standard, Unicode-compliant emoji font that would work within Gecko, even if we get it downloaded/installed. The description at https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/support-library/preview/emoji-compat.html says:

# EmojiCompat Font
#     EmojiCompat uses a font to display emoji. This font is a modified version of the Android Emoji font. The font is modified as follows:
#
#         To provide backward compatibility to render emoji, all emoji characters are represented with a single Unicode code point in Unicode’s Supplemental Private Use Area-A starting with U+F0001.
#         Extra emoji metadata is inserted in a binary format into the font and is parsed at runtime by EmojiCompat. The data is embedded in the font’s meta table, with the private tag Emji.

which makes it sound to me like the font will only work in conjunction with their custom (Java) widgets/classes.

Maybe this can all be hooked up and made to work, but I'm not at all confident of it at this point.