Apple Color Emoji image extraction

This script and library takes the Apple Color Emoji font file (found on macOS systems) and the Unicode emoji spec test file as inputs, and extracts the bitmap image data for each emoji from the font at all available sizes. Of the 3377 emoji listed in the Emoji 5.0 test file, we're able to extract all 3356 supported by Apple emoji. The script also allows additional codepoints to be specified in data/additional.txt for any emoji not listed in the test file (e.g. standalone skin tones).

Requirements & Dependencies

• macOS (latest version recommended; tested with 13.3.1)
• Ruby (latest version recommended; tested with 3.0.3p157)
• At least 500MB of free disk space 😛

Running

# Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/alfredxing/emoji.git

# Copy the Apple emoji file to the repo directory
cd emoji && cat "/System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttc" > "Apple Color Emoji.ttc"

# Run the script
ruby emoji.rb

Output

The script outputs images to the img/ directory, which is then split into subdirectories, one for each size. Images are in PNG format, and named as the sequence of corresponding Unicode code points, joined by a dash (-).

For example, the 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 family: man, woman, girl, girl emoji at size 64 would be located at img/64/1F468-200D-1F468-200D-1F467-200D-1F467.png.

Technical documentation

Documentation on how the code works can be found in DEVELOPMENT.md.

References

• Apple TrueType Reference Manual: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/
• Cal's emoji-data project: https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data
• The Unicode Emoji spec (currently supported version is Emoji 5.0): https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-12.html
  • This spec includes the source for the data/emoji-test.txt file: https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-test.txt
• The Font::TTF Perl module (in particular the AATUtils.pm file): https://metacpan.org/pod/Font::TTF