gdx-EmojiSupport

LibGDX Emoji support (glyphs injection technique)

Usage:

1. Just drop the EmojiSupport.java into your project
2. Copy the emoji atlas files into your assets folder
3. Add code support

...
 EmojiSupport emojiSupport;   // global instance
 ...
 // Create instance, load emojis and add to existing font(s)
 emojiSupport= new EmojiSupport();
 emojiSupport.Load(Gdx.files.internal("data/emojis25.atlas"));
 emojiSupport.AddEmojisToFont(skin.getFont("default-font"));
 ...
 // Filter/translate emojis before display
 Label label1 = new Label(emojiSupport.FilterEmojis(str), skin);

Description of the problem:

Current limitation: The Glyph class uses a char as index so should need a lot of work to change all the logic (ex: line-breaks) to use multi-chars (unicode emojis). So the solution is to "inject" new Glyphs (from another Texture page) to the current BitmapFont using a special char index ( > 0xB000). When a string includes an Emoji Code, for example: 😎 (\ud83d\ude0e) [two chars] is replaced by a char 0xB001 [one char] that points to its emoji Glyph texture region.

Benefits:

• Only one emoji.png (Atlas) file needed (can be added to all fonts in the App)
• Don't messes the GlyphsRun, BitmapFonts, BitmapFontCache, etc core Gdx classes
• You can add only your "preferred" emojis (reduce space)
• You can use emojis at greater or lower resolutions (will scale to the font size)
• No cpu-cost in runtime (it's exactly the same as any other char)
• Also supported in FreeType run-time generated fonts
• Supports multi-pages emojis (emoji atlas with more than one png).
• Tested in iOS (RoboVM).

Drawbacks:

• Always need to call to FilterEmojis to translate double-char codes (unicode) to 0xB000+i chars (This may not be a drawback as only in very few places you need to use texts with Emojis)
• Text setColor() functions not supported (only in b&w emojis).

To Do work:

• Not tested in TextAreas.
• Flags emojis and some other emojis are missing
• Not supported skin-tone modifiers

USEFUL LINKS:

All Unicode chars : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

Tables : https://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl

Conversions : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33320058/converting-unicode-symbols-to-their-code

Java surrogate chars : https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Character.html

Special char FE0F : https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/fe0f/index.htm

Emoji images source : https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji

Inspirated in : https://github.com/taluks/libgdx-emodji

CHANGELOG

• v.1.1 - Support for multi pages emojis (bugfix)
• v.1.0 - Initial release

Color or B&W emojis

Linear (anti-aliasing) or Nearest Filter

Emojis collections

Color Emojis 25x25 https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji/tree/master/apple

Packed with TexturePacker : 821 emojis , 1.32 Mb size

Black and White Emojis 25x25 https://github.com/stv0g/unicode-emoji/tree/master/symbola

Packed with TexturePacker : 789 emojis , 0.36 Mb size