Remove gemoji and replace it with emoticon_fontify gem. #362
Conversation
## Removal of gemoji * Apple almost certainly doesn't freely licence their Emoji font so using it without permission is probably legally a Bad Idea™. * The Gemoji gem has issues disabled so if there's ever a problem asking questions or getting it fixed is near impossible. * Gemoji recomends serving the images from /public which won't work in a mounted engine. * Serving the Gemoji images from /assets is possible but slows down precompilation hugely (over 800 images!) * Do we really need over 800 emoji? ## Addition of emoticon_fontify * The emoticon font is properly licenced, free and open source. * Hundreds less emojis. * Instead of hard to remember codes like😝 you can simply type an emoticon as you normally would and it is converted :-) * Helper method is built into the gem. * The gem is an engine so the necessary font and stylesheet assets are automatically included in the asset pipeline. * As it's a font the emoticons can easily be styled to match the forum's text color and size, it will zoom well, and display crisply on double pixel ratio devices.
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So to be clear this isn't emoji at all? |
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Correct. I kept thinking about the best way to make Gemoji work, and the problems with it, then thought, do we really want emoji? Now maybe the answer is yes (they are kinda cool), in which case ignore this pull request ;) To me the massive size of the Gemoji gem is overkill, and nobody will remember all the codes. Which brings me to another problem, I talked to members of my forum and they didn't like having to use those codes like The new The thing that concerns me the most is the legality of using Apple's emoji glyphs. See, the Unicode standard has been updated to include code points for emoji, just like there are code points for letter, numbers, etc. So, just like you might type the letter So to sum up, this gem is smaller, simpler, better fits user expectations, and uses only properly licensed open source materials. |
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@sfcgeorge You realize those glyphs that Apple implemented were just to replicate commonly used emoji from Japan. If you have a problem with using those glyphs I think it would be more constructive to provide better licensed replacements. Personally I want emoji so a patch like this is not something I would want. Of course if others would not want emoji making it optional (like detecting if gemoji is in the bundle and using it if it is, otherwise not using it) or making it so you can specify your emoji/emoticon engine would probably be better. |
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@Kagetsuki Yes I agree emoji are commonly used in Japan and Apple created their own implementation, as have other handset manufacturers, OS vendors, and carriers. We are totally free to use the concept of emoji as defined by Unicode, just not Apple's implementation, or Microsoft's, or anyone else's that doesn't have an open source compatible licence. You're absolutely right, it would be more constructive to provide better licensed replacements, feel free to create the 800 or so images and submit a pull request. I spent a lot of time searching and couldn't find a comprehensive and suitably licensed alternative. I like emoji myself, I'm not against them or anything, I just think there are some big problems with the current Gemoji method of including them that need addressing. I quite like your suggestion of making this feature optional, or abstracting it. That might be the perfect solution so people are free to use whatever emoticon/emoji set they like best, just as IM apps like Adium offer several different emoticon packs. Forem already allows the use of an external text formatter such as one of the great Markdown ones, I wonder if this idea could be extended. Perhaps there could be a new text formatter that adds emoji and wraps whichever other text formatter someone wants to use. At this point I wonder if @radar has any thoughts and wants to weigh in as I'm not seeing a perfect solution. |
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Wait are you claiming the implementation was taken from Apple or just some of the images were used? If it's the implementation I'm not sure how to think of the whole situation, particularly since Apple just replicated the common emoji system found between carriers like DoCoMo and AU. I absolutely agree with you on it being a bit scary using Apple copyrighted stuff. There could be a solution like running an kickstarter to create a free or CC set (I've got a good artist who would jump on the opportunity to create 800+ good looking emoji). I do sort of wonder if someone hasn't already though. Making it optional would be the quickest fix, then after that add something in so you could choose a different engine or maybe even setting up a pipeline of multiple engines could be possible. Let's get some feedback from @radar before we debate any further. |
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I'd prefer if we could stick with the traditional emoji font set, rather than having something that's completely different. How does GitHub get away with using the emoji that they use? |
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I'd also like to know the answer to this question of how @github are using it. |
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It's not a traditional emoji font set, it's Apple's emjoi font. I'd ask GitHub directly how they get away with it but they have issues off so can't. I'd guess they don't understand who owns those emoji glyphs (perhaps they mistakenly think the actual graphics are included in the unicode spec). Or maybe they looked somewhere I didn't and found that Apple Color Emoji is free to use by all (I doubt that, Apple open sources some core code components, not design and features that help to sell products). Most likely they simply haven't thought about it, or think ripping images from a font is ok and somehow different from ripping a movie from a DVD and redistributing it. It could have been a GitHub employee's pet project (I believe they are encouraged to experiment for a few hours a week) that their boss thought looked cool so it got pushed throughout the site without being a properly looked at. I'd really like to be proven wrong, if someone could find a CC licence for the glyphs from Apple then great (or any other suitable explanation). There's a good chance I am wrong, I have no legal experience and limited background experience in open source. But unless anyone can prove I am wrong, then I don't think using and redistributing commercial graphics is a good idea — I'm sure Apple's lawyers wouldn't see ignorance as an excuse. |
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It was rather hard to find but, from the OSX license:
So my guess is we're all breaking the law but Apple is either passively ignoring [likely?] it or they don't realize it [unlikely?]. I'm discussing putting up a kickstarter to create an Open Source friendly (I'm thinking CC licensed) replacement set with the Genshin artists net.kamui and se.noize. |
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@Kagetsuki Awesome, thank you for finding this. Looking in the Font Book / Show Font Info panel reveals the font is embeddable. Screenshot here: http://cl.ly/M9ne Now, I'm not 100% sure what embeddable means.I assume it means, say you make a poster and save it as a PDF with the fonts embedded so that the print company doesn't have to have those fonts. This kind of embedding seems quite different to redistributing. An open source emoji font/glyph set is a very interesting idea. Unicode defines all the emojis and both Apple and Microsoft have produced implementations so the framework and inspiration is there already. Doing it via Kickstarter seems sensible since creating hundreds of emoji glyphs for free in spare time seems unreasonable / it would take many spare evenings. I'd be interested to see if you explore this idea further, good luck! |
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@parndt Good idea asking the authors. Why didn't we think of that |
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@sfcgeorge Embeddable means you can use the font in a PDF or other data file that is being distributed AS LONG AS that data is being authored on a machine that has a proper license to the font (iOS/OSX) and you are absolutely correct - gemoji is redistributing not embedding. I'm talking net.kamui into the idea right now. He's the lead artist on our currently failing kickstarter here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374397522/scroll-ninja-revised?ref=home_location We'll be re-launching but before that he'll have some down time while the lead dev catches up. This could be the perfect time-filler, and sticker sheets/cheat sheets on other goods with the newly created emoji could be nice rewards. |
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Since we're not getting any response here me and Tohyama have decided to progress with the kickstarter idea anyway. We'll be putting up a campaign for a free set of emoji that includes all the standard and extended currently being provided by Apple and hopefully a few more. If anyone has suggestions for licenses they'd want etc. I'd love to hear them and why. In the end we'll probably do something like http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/ and we'll provide an initial set with a forked-and-modified gemoji. |
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I think that sounds awesome, and I'd be super happy if such a thing made On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 11:06 AM, 影月 零 notifications@github.com wrote:
Josh Adams |
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Nothing more restrictive than an MIT license please (aka no GPL) |
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This is a great idea guys. Thanks for taking the initiative. On 23 January 2013 06:57, Philip Arndt notifications@github.com wrote:
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@parndt I think we'll use the same license set as FontAwesome, SIL for the font we generate, MIT for code and CC for the images themselves. That way anyone can use it anyway any time and not need to worry about doing anything in particular. |
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CC without attribution, right? |
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@parndt yup, no attribution required. I mean credit would be nice but that kind of defeats the point. http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/#license has a description of the combo and links. |
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We'll be putting up the kickstarter soon. I'll contact everyone once it's up - getting the word out will be much appreciated. We even made some initial samples and we'll at least release those for free regardless of success of the campaign. |
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A fried suggested something to me that seems so obvious now. Clearly Apples emoji are not free for the picking, however Android is open source and has emoji! So after quite a bit of digging I found the AndroidEmoji.ttf with licence "Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0". It is not a color font like Apples but a traditional vector font. On the plus side this means it is small enough to be included entirely on a web page, though it's not as pretty. With this font, one option would be to embed the font in the page as a webont. Then, a gem on Forem's side would convert the
What do you guys think of this idea? If I was to make a gem to do this do you think that would be an acceptable solution? @Kagetsuki you could still go ahead with the Kickstarter if you specifically want color emojis - I think this could be a good thing. It's rare for really good design to be open source so it could be interesting. |
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This is clearly the superior technical solution. I had not considered oy at
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@knewter Thanks for the thumbs up. I can use the codes from |
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@sfcgeorge we've started working on modifying gemoji and created some samples for the project. We'd have the kickstarter up by now but I've been swamped. Tohyama made some excellent samples for most of the faces, much nicer than the Apple ones if you ask me. How about we team up, convert gemoji to the Android set and add in the face samples, then we'll throw up the kickstarter to complete the set in full color vectors etc. That way we'll have a valid license right away so we don't need to worry about Apple and we'll have a future path with a full color rich set. What do you say? |
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@sfcgeorge Re-reading your comment I really like your idea better than just overriding the defaults in gemoji. How about we team up on the kickstarter so we can get you paid for your work too? If you're interested let's lay out a plan. |
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@Kagetsuki I think the best thing you could do is create plain image glyphs, so 800 replacement I'm not sure how much use I'd be teaming up with you on a kickstarter, you'd probably want just 1 designer for consistency, and I have personal projects, client work and uni work keeping me busy. But feel free to email me if you want and I'll see how I can help out. Address: simon @ (github username) .co.uk |
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@scfgeorge It's actually going to be easier working out of gemoji than not - this way we'll have a full implementation right away and we can drop in new images when we make them. I also want to be able to build a font file from a rake command so in the future if there are updates we can just build the font or other developers can do it themselves. The sample set we created we've output to PNG of the same size as gemoji but the raws are all vector so we may distribute a set of SVG as well. As for the actual image/glyph creation I'd like Tohyama to be doing that. I just really like your gem idea and think that would be a very nice implementation to serve the created assets on. Also I'm constantly bogged down with work and a little understudied on how these fonts work whereas you seem to have done your homework and are rearing to go - so it seems to me having you do the coding [to an advanced implementation] would be better for everyone. We'll continue with the current plan for now but perhaps funding your efforts would be good to put down as a reach goal? I'll e-mail you in a little bit with the kickstarter preview project and an archive of the samples Tohyama has produced so far. |
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Just an update everyone, we've finally got the kickstarter campaign up http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/374397522/phantom-open-emoji . Please pass it around, Tohyama will start making images as soon as the initial goal is hit. I'll have a repo up with the assets and some scripts as soon as we see some interest from the kickstarter project. |
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Thanks for your hard work, it's looking great so far. I of course backed, hopefully enough others do that this can become the best set for integration into open source forums, blogs, comment systems, etc. |
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I backed it. Awesome guys
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So for clarification, the kickstarter for Phantom Open Emoji was successfully backed, and consequently the plan is to ultimately use a gem that uses those emoji. Having said that, I propose (a) closing this PR unmerged, and (b) congratulating @Kagetsuki et al. I'll cover both of those now. Congrats @Kagetsuki! |
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Congratulations @Kagetsuki! |
Removal of gemoji
using it without permission is probably legally a Bad Idea™.
asking questions or getting it fixed is near impossible.
a mounted engine.
precompilation hugely (over 800 images!)
Addition of emoticon_fontify
:stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:you can simply type an emoticon as you normally would and it is
converted :-)
automatically included in the asset pipeline (just need requiring the usual way).
forum's text color and size, it will zoom well, and display crisply on
double pixel ratio devices.
Making it work
I have modified Forem to use the gem. A user of forum only has to do a few simple things to get it working.
First one must require the gem so that the asset pipeline can do its thing.
Finally (yep just 2 steps) one has to add the emoticon stylesheet to their
application.cssI'd love to hear any thoughts or suggestions. And feel free to submit an issue on the emoticon_fontify page if you find anything broken and I'll look into it.