Iris and colour emojis

While investigating why Iris on two seaparate machines was pausing loading pages on one and fine on the other I found out that Iris supports colour emojis.

Turns out it was due to the font cache files being recreated each time. The fix was to clear the font cache folder before starting Iris. This made Iris create the font cache files only once.

The folder to clear is !UnixFC.cache. If using native SATA or NVME drives the font cache files only take a few seconds to recreate.

I didn’t realise that as Iris uses freetype for fonts it can display colour emojis provided the required fonts are installed in !UnixFont.
A font that has colour emojis is the Noto truetype font family. I copied the whole folder from a linux install to !UnixFonts.truetype. The actual font file is NotoColorEmoji.ttf.

Using html entities it’s straightforward to use them in a RISC OS web browser.

<ul>
  <li>Coffee &#9749;</li>
  <li>Pizza &#127829;</li>
  <li>Ice Cream &#127846;</li>
</ul>

• Coffee ☕
• Pizza 🍕
• Ice Cream 🍦