1# Chapter 15¾: serenity-emoji, two hundred and fifty-nine tiny flags and two thumbs
2
3Hover "online" in the top bar and every open page is listed with its
4country's flag. A flag emoji is a strange thing: there is no "US flag"
5character. There are 26 letters, the regional indicators 🇦 to 🇿, and a
6font that knows two of them side by side draws one flag for the pair. So
7whether you see a flag or just the letters "US" depends on the fonts you
8have. Windows, famously, has none: it shows the letters.
9
10So the site brings its own, and since everything else here is pixel type
11and dithered dots, it brings pixel flags: the ones the SerenityOS project
12drew for its emoji set, which Linus Groh packed into a TrueType font. This
13folder holds just the flags from it, 259 of them, and the 👍 and 👎 of the
14vote under each answer: 23 KB.
15
16```mermaid
17flowchart LR
18  S["SerenityOS emoji, as PNGs"] -->|"linusg/serenityos-emoji-font"| T["SerenityOS-Emoji.ttf, 650 KB"]
19  T -->|"pyftsubset: the 26 letters, two thumbs"| F["emoji.woff2, 23 KB"]
20  F -->|"/emoji.woff2"| P["the online list, the vote buttons"]
21```
22
23> **Aside: why the whole font is not needed.** A font can say which
24> characters it covers (`unicode-range`), and the browser downloads it only
25> when a page uses one of them. Even so, it downloads the whole file. Cutting
26> it down to the letters means a visitor fetches 23 KB, once, and only when
27> the page shows one of them.
28
29> **Try it.** Open <https://lmjtfy.fun/emoji.woff2>: that is
30> the whole font. Or hover "online" in the top bar of any page here.
31
32## For the people who maintain it
33
34The Worker embeds `emoji.woff2` at build time and serves it at
35`/emoji.woff2`; `page.css` declares it as the font for the list's flags and
36the vote buttons' thumbs.
37
38| File | What |
39| --- | --- |
40| [emoji.woff2](emoji.woff2) | The regional indicators (U+1F1E6 to U+1F1FF) and their 259 flag ligatures, and 👍 👎 (U+1F44D, U+1F44E), from SerenityOS-Emoji.ttf built at linusg/serenityos-emoji-font `17bb462c25b9` (2026-08-14), as WOFF2. A COLR colour font. |
41| [LICENSE](LICENSE) | BSD 2-Clause, the SerenityOS project's and the font's. It goes wherever the font goes. |
42
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