/ The Grapefruit font

The Grapefruit font contains a number of fruit symbols that were added to Unicode in version 6.0 (PDF). The graphics are taken from an xkcd comic with a similar name.

If you have this font installed, then this:

🍅 🍇 🍉 🍋 🍌 🍍 🍎 🍏 🍐 🍑 🍒 🍓

should look something like this:

grapefruit.png

If you don't have the font installed, but your browser is cool enough to support @font-face with Truetype fonts, then this paragraph might look like fruits:

🍅 🍇 🍉 🍋 🍌 🍍 🍎 🍏 🍐 🍑 🍒 🍓

The following CSS snippet lets any HTML element with the class fruit use the Grapefruit font:

@font-face {
    font-family: Grapefruit;
    src: url(http://xn--5dbqm8ad.xn--9dbdkw.se/grapefruit/Grapefruit.ttf)
         format("truetype");
    unicode-range: U+1F345-1F353;
}

.fruit {
    font-family: Grapefruit;
}

Feel free to use it for your web site. Just keep in mind that the licence doesn't allow commercial use.

So what is this about?

These fruit characters are examples of emoji, picture characters popular among Japanese mobile phone users. As noted in the emoji FAQ at unicode.org, there are 722 emoji in a "core" set common to the three biggest Japanese mobile operators. They were mapped to Unicode in version 6.0, after a proposal by Apple and Google. 114 of them were mapped to existing Unicode characters, while the other 608 (including these fruit symbols) were newly encoded.

I wanted to try using these characters, but couldn't find any font covering them, much less a freely usable one. (Which perhaps isn't a surprise, since I looked for fonts right after Unicode 6.0 was published in October 2010.) So this xkcd comic came to mind, and I decided to remix it.

Download

You can download the TTF file itself, or a tarball/zipfile containing the source:

Like the original comic, this font is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Gallery

There is no gallery of interesting uses of this font yet. Why don't you put some examples on ?the discussion page? Or contact me directly.

Development

The source code lives on Github. You can use Fontforge to edit the font.

Alternatives

Another font that supports these symbols (and many many others) is the Symbola font by George Douros.