[XeTeX] Insert Smileys in XeLaTeX

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 09:32:14PM +0900, Simon Cozens wrote:
> On 16/12/2014 20:24, Marek Stepanek wrote:
> > I put together a test file, based on the first example. I replaced the
> > "Linux Libertine O", which is not installed on my computer, with Lucida
> > Grande. This font is displaying these smileys well in my text editor
> > BBEdit and my Terminal too (with an other font: Menlo Regular), but not
> > in the compiled XeLaTeX-file.
> 
> The problem is that in your terminal and BBEdit, the system is
> performing font substitution; neither Menlo nor Lucida Grande contain
> the emoji characters, so the system shows you the characters in a
> different font. (Probably Apple Color Emoji)
> 
> For some reason I can't get xelatex to use Apple Color Emoji, but the
> Symbola font (available from http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola.zip
> ) also contains those characters. Install that font, add in this line:

Apple Color Emoji uses the new “sbix” table for colored Emojis, which
basically embeds colored bitmaps in the font file, but xdvipdfmx does
not support that table. I’m not sure what is the proper way to
handle this; should it just keep the table in the font when embedding
it in the PDF (so it will work only in PDF viewers that support it) or
extract the bitmaps and insert them directly in the PDF? Either way
means xdvipdfmx needs to understand the table (either to subset it or to
extract the bitmaps).

Regards,
Khaled