Emoji: how do you render U+1F355? | Hacker News Reader

Emoji: how do you render U+1F355?

meowni.ca

92 pointsholman51 comments

"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...

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.

> emoji are apple and google (and late to the party, adobe)['s] way of enforcing their wishes on everyone else

Sure, that's why we refer to them with a Japanese word.

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.

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

Well, this argument is dead when the skin tone variations are introduced. Now they have to be colored to be politically correct.

> 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.

Yeah, same here. Is there any way to fix this on chrome/firefox without changing my operating system? Because an OS requirement for a browser to render fonts properly is completely ridiculous.

Pretty sure emoji are the only glyphs that can be colored.

Until recently, yes, but OpenType has been introducing support for colored glyphs: https://bixacolor.com/

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

(Q from a beginner Japanese student: where's the fourth syllable in ディーブイディー? Does ブイ count as two mora and ディー counts as one?)

By JP standards, the way you mean, DVD has six syllables (ディーブイディー).

The previous poster probably meant that the Japanese pronunciation sounds like what in English would be considered four syllables.

Yes, that's what I meant.

> it's no longer a Japanese word, and doesn't have to follow Japanese rules

No word ever has to follow any rules. Nonetheless it's pretty typical for loan words to keep rules like this from the source language, at least until different usage becomes widespread.

> Nonetheless it's pretty typical for loan words to keep rules like this from the source language

I wouldn't even know of the japanese rules to "keep" when pluralizing "emoji". Apart from that, as an city-dwelling Indian, quite a lot of our language borrows words from English and Hindi when we are not speaking either of these languages. The rules are always that of the target language, rather than the source language.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The author works for Google on Polymer.

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

...but just for UTF-16, aka the worst Unicode encoding.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Awesome article! Thanks for the share!

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

Emoji is the new punctuation.

Don't use non obvious acronyms please, that's really annoying

It's a pretty common abbreviation. Fun fact, not actually an acronym (acronyms are pronounceable words like radar and laser).

I recognized it as somewhat common but I didn't know what it stood for.

I have now looked it up, and am including the definition for the convenience of anyone who also didn't know it:

It apparently stands for " For fscks sake" except with the s swapped for another letter.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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