Is it possible to render multi-coloured emojis with ImageMagick?

Question

I have a text that may contain emojis. I want to render it into JPEG image with RMagick (I can also use ImageMagick directly).

I was able to render only monochrome emojis with AndroidEmoji.ttf, but ImageMagick renders interrogation signs if I use AppleColorEmoji.ttf. Here's how I do it:

require 'rmagick'
granite = Magick::ImageList.new('granite:')
canvas = Magick::ImageList.new
canvas.new_image(300, 100, Magick::TextureFill.new(granite))

input = "👠 👯👢 👣"
text = Magick::Draw.new
text.font = 'AppleColorEmoji.ttf'
text.pointsize = 20
text.gravity = Magick::CenterGravity
text.annotate(canvas, 0, 0, 0, 0, input)
canvas.write('result.jpg')

Is it possible to render coloured emojis with ImageMagick or is there another tool that can help?

Answer 1

You can use pango for text rendering (as of v6.7.6-3):

convert pango:'Hello! 😀How are you?' example.png

Produces this image (using v7.0.8-36)

See https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/#pango for more details on how to use pango with ImageMagick

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I'm on Ubuntu 18.04, using ImageMagick 7.0.8-36 (by compiling from source), which looks to have this configuration

Features: Cipher DPC HDRI OpenMP 
Delegates (built-in): bzlib djvu fontconfig freetype jbig jng jpeg lcms lqr lzma openexr pangocairo png tiff wmf x xml zlib

And it looks like I'm using Pangocairo 1.40.14

$ convert -list format | grep -i pango
    PANGO* r--   Pango Markup Language (Pangocairo 1.40.14)