Backporting Windows 8.1's color emoji renderings to Windows 7 or earlier OS

[Brickedandroid]

Anyone knows which are the system files (DLLs or EXEs) that are used to render the fonts and unicode-related things from Windows 8.1? Because those might have some functions inside that also render the Segoe UI Emoji font colored, and I want to apply that on Windows 7 or earlier operating systems. But if I just install the Segoe UI Emoji ttf file obtained from Windows 10 or 11, the emojis are only colored inside Firefox, but are black and white outside Firefox!

Edited April 28, 2023 by Brickedandroid

[kar1]

I know that the WinCenterTitle project on GitHub hooks DirectWrite calls from uDWM.dll to modify the way window titles are rendered, and its 1.1 version works on Windows 7.

And for the font rendering itself, it has to do with DirectWrite functions.

For the text itself (not just font rendering) it has to do with ctfmon / CTF DLLs.

Now something interesting is the MacType project on GitHub:

https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype

It changes the way fonts are rendered in Windows, it mentions Windows 10 compatibility (so not just Windows 10 only) and there's that line mentioning colored fonts support.

Can you try MacType even if you don't need Mac-like antialiasing, then see if your Segoe UI font starts supporting colors on Windows 7?

If it works, then it's a good start.

You might also need an up-to-date 'Segoe UI Emoji' font, or perhaps even taking Windows 8.1 copies of Segoe UI fonts and merging Segoe UI Emoji codepages in them with FontForge/FontCreator.

This way all apps will start being able to display Emojis.

Might even do this with Tahoma, Consolas, Lucida Console & MS Shell Dlg fonts for full Emoji support.

[Brickedandroid]

MacType is sometimes buggy and breaks some programs

[kar1]

Are you sure that MacType itself is buggy or is it just that its Mac-like antialiasing isn't good enough?

 

If MacType just causes fonts to look bad, it will still be technically working.

As long as there are no explicit error messages or crashes.

 

If you're then able to see colored fonts where the emojis are otherwise black&white it will be a good start, even if the text rendering is visually botched.

 

What I mean is that it's not too bad if MacType optimization looks wrong, it's more about verifying whether MacType is technically able to hook Windows font rendering to output colored characters where there was only black&white font support before it.

 

If it actually brings colored fonts support, then MacType could be forked into a new project without the aliasing optimization part.

Just the enhanced fonts support, and this would solve both the colored emoji support for Windows 7 & the MacType optimization problems.

[Brickedandroid]

Some programs (especially services) sometimes crash while running MacType, although the system still behaves like normal. But I hate that situation.

Edited May 11, 2023 by Brickedandroid