Dark corners of Unicode
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I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a tragedy, because Unicode has a lot of… ah, depth to it. Not to say that Unicode is a terrible disaster — more that human language is a terrible disa
  • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Color fonts also seem like such a pain to create. At least what I’ve seen (for non-paid stuff), people are saying to start in Font Forge, use a Python tool (fonttools*) to convert to SVG, add color (either manually with Inkscape, or inject color with the same tool), then use the tool to merge the SVGs back into your font. * the version I have (mangohud dependency) either doesn’t have those commands or I need to do more

    I can maybe understand that if it gives you both single-color and multi-color glyphs (assuming de-color isn’t actually a thing), though it would be nice if I could just use 1 command to bundle a folder of SVGs into an OTF file. Though that’s for my usage in Godot, where multiple fonts and a fallback option makes a dedicated symbol font make more sense.

    in Godot

    I prefer working with Textmesh, though that doesn’t handle color (from fonts) at all. A vertex color shader could display it, even a per-glyph color map would be something (but I have no idea how to do so without re-implementing textmesh from scratch).

    Low-poly, freeform text in 3 forms: 2D, Textmesh, and label3D. They each say "Look" with a single-color fire icon, though the label3D has an outline and the 2D text has stacked outlines/shadows which add color (also, a default eye emoji on the 2D text).