
Emoji: how do you render U+1F355? - holman
http://meowni.ca/posts/emoji-emoji-emoji/
======
chungy
"An emoji is a coloured glyph."

OK. Stop right there. An emoji is a glyph, it need not be colored. The funny
part, is that on my system and my fonts, all the examples (not provided as
PNGs) are plain black-and-white renderings with the Symbola font. Even on
Chrome on Linux, I don't even see the Canadian flag example she shows.

Really, most of this seems solid but it continues a rather annoying trend of
assuming that Apple's font are _the_ emoji. At least she recognizes that other
fonts exist, but carries on this assumption...

~~~
gcb0
emoji are apple and google (and late to the party, adobe) way of enforcing
their wishes on everyone else.

they are using their monopoly to push the utf groups, just like microsoft did
with w3c when using IE6 monopoly. at least emoji cause less damage.

~~~
bitwize
More like SoftBank and NTT DoCoMo's way of enforcing their wishes on everyone
else. Emoji started off as being proprietary to Japanese cellphone carriers,
and got picked up by Apple when they realized they could make a killing by
smoothly transitioning Japanese users to their platform.

~~~
gcb0
rigth. maybe in the 90s. now its mostly dictated by apple and google.

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hobarrera
FWIW, linux also has some emoji that are colour, albeit, gecko-only:
[https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-
font](https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font)

~~~
jmiserez
There's also EmojiOne, install instructions for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS here:
[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/05/emoji-one-font-linux-
ppa-...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/05/emoji-one-font-linux-ppa-easy-
install)

And from OPs article:

 _> These fonts are AppleColorEmoji (OS X), Segoe UI Symbol/Emoji (Windows),
NotoColorEmoji (Android) and I don’t know what Linux does, but it’s probably
black and white and who cares, I hear you can run bash on Windows now._

Statements like these are precisely the reason why I think getting Linux/Bash
support on Windows is a _bad_ thing.

~~~
cataphract
Installing the noto-fonts-emoji package on Arch and viewing the page on
Firefox, I can see the color emoji, like the popcorns before the "How did we
get so lucky?" header.

~~~
jmiserez
I just tested the two Emoji displaying Chrome extensions on Linux and compared
the output with Mobile Safari.

Chromoji [1] got all of them right, including the special Canadian flag emoji.
Emojify got some of them right, but wrongly shows the flag as a "C" and "A"
character and misses a few others.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emojis-
fo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emojis-for-
googl/negakbijaemdgbhklopmghphgaeadmpo?hl=en)

------
forgottenpass
_Emoji does not have a plural in Japanese, so stop trying to make emojis
happen._

In the long run, I would have preferred Gretchen make fetch happen rather than
Regina make this turn of phrase happen.

~~~
krapp
Once English speakers start using it, it's no longer a Japanese word, and
doesn't have to follow Japanese rules.

"DVD" has four syllables in Japanese. Stuff like that just happens with
loanwords sometimes.

~~~
skissane
There's a decent history in English of "borrow the pluralisation rules of the
source language". Many English dictionaries accept cherubim as a plural of
cherub, seraphim as a plural of seraph, aquaria as a plural of aquarium,
criteria as a plural of criterion, phenomena as a plural of phenomenon,
referenda as a plural of referendum, fora as a plural of forum, etc.

Now, maybe this approach only applies to languages which English-speakers have
traditionally considered as culturally prestigious or authoritative. Arguably
that's true of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, traditionally not so for Japanese.

~~~
AckSyn
It's typically the undereducated that defines this popular usage trend.

------
trevorcreech
Make sure you click the party emoji in the left menu.

~~~
Razengan
Oh that's fun. I will use it everywhere I can.

------
Bromskloss
Can we fork Unicode into a version that has none of these… things?

------
paulddraper
Is this a JS blog? It suddenly started talking about JavaScript for some
reason.

~~~
progval
It is only used to show the number of bytes of a string of emojis

~~~
the8472
Which entirely depends on the encoding, of which there are many.

------
the8472
And yet we still don't have a good way of doing keyboard-input of arbitrary
unicode characters based on their name / description.

~~~
mFixman
Swiftkey has an option to autocomplete to emojis, and it's pretty useful.

~~~
the8472
There is more to unicode than emoji. That's why i phrased it the way I did.

------
petercooper
We're using emojis as icons within an internal app now, and it works
fantastically. I was kinda against emojis at first but having seen the use
cases, they seem to be working out well.

------
amelius
Related, why is Whatsapp missing the facepalm emoji, U+1F926?

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
Most likely it's Unicode database is too old. It was a recent addition.

------
soared
Does anyone know which atom theme that is? All I found was a squirrel in the
html.

------
gabrielcsapo
Awesome article! Thanks for the share!

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spdionis
FFS why do we even need emoji? This is ridiculous.

~~~
roywiggins
They're a cultural import from Japan. People like them. That's really a good
enough reason.

~~~
krapp
No one ever complains about the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Linear A, or
alchemical symbols, or any of the _actual_ useless cruft in Unicode... just
emoji.

Why? Is it the poo emoji? Do people hate emoji because they're popular? I
don't understand. The utility of including emoji in Unicode is more evident
than with a lot of other character sets. It shouldn't even be controversial.

------
paulddraper
Sigh. I remember when font color used to mean something.

------
wodenokoto
I could have done without the first paragraph, but other than that this was
interesting and well written.

I particularly enjoyed the roll-over effect on the links.

~~~
deckar01
I don't trust anyone who thinks Nicolas Cage is dreamy.

------
gcb0
hint: if you write an article about something that is broken and constantly
moving by the hour, do not use that thing to document your article.

if she didn't use utf but images (to talk about the rendering) that article
would have been something in 4 days, when it will be irrelevant because fonts
and browsers will already have changed.

Also, people on the several platforms she dismissed as nobody-cares (android
pre 5, linux, windows pre-7, etc) would have had a clue about the subject.

~~~
harrisi
This seems a bit harsh. From the article, "I’m going to keep talking about the
Apple font, because that’s the code path I worked on in Chrome..." Although
this is toward the end of the article, it does give a good reason for why the
author is only focusing on a rather small domain: she worked on this specific
domain (Chrome, Apple, emoji). In case it wasn't immediately obvious, she
doesn't actually mention any browser (or rendering engine) other than Chrome
(Blink). Perhaps you were looking for a more complete essay on all things
emoji, but it looks more like the author just wanted to write about some stuff
she had worked on that she thought was interesting.

~~~
gcb0
Was talking about presentation not content.

for anyone outside the san francisco bubble (ie not using Chrome on a last
model mac) this article only shows mojibake.

if you want to talk about broken rendering, always take screen shot.

