Quote:
Originally Posted by Artie
If somebody can please let me know a device that supports them, I will be very grateful. Thank you very much.
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"Emojis" are characters. Just like the letters 'A' or 'B' or 'C'.
- ✈ = U+2708 = AIRPLANE
- 😢 = U+1F622 = CRYING FACE
- 😭 = U+1F62D = LOUDLY CRYING FACE
It would be like saying, "Does the device support Turkish?"
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Emoji/Unicode + Fonts
Now, every year, Unicode does add more and more characters/symbols... and older devices do tend to have much older fonts.
If you are using very old/common characters, like
- ✈ = AIRPLANE was introduced in June 1993! (Unicode 1.1)
- ✏ = PENCIL (Unicode 1.1)
it will most likely appear fine.
If you're using newer ones, like:
- ⚽ = SOCCER BALL = August 2009 (Unicode 5.2)
it will
maybe show up.
If it's extremely new, like:
- 🧛 = VAMPIRE = June 2017. (Unicode 10.0)
- 🥷 = NINJA = March 2020. (Unicode 13.0)
- 🪈 = FLUTE = September 2022. (Unicode 15.0)
there's an extremely slim chance it'll work in
anything, even many of the newest browsers/phones/OSes.
It usually takes
years for these fonts to trickle out... and many older devices, especially ereaders, will never see those updates.
So:
- the older your character is, the most likely it'll be there.
- the newer the character is, you'll probably want to embed a specific font for that symbol.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phillipgessert
[...] I would think out-of-the box support would be spotty for e-ink devices, where the greyscale display would also make em look pretty bad even if they did work.
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There are black-and-white fallback characters for all Unicode symbols.
There has to be, because you can have these symbols in filenames and all sorts of crazy stuff.
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Side Note: If you want extreme technical details on all that color/emoji/font stuff, I wrote a detailed post back in:
where I discussed all 4 different implementations of OpenType "Color Fonts".
I believe Google just recently released a 5th one too! See:
Quote:
Originally Posted by phillipgessert
Depending on the symbols used, legibility might also suffer in different color modes.
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Yep. Especially at small sizes, some of these are not understandable. And with Apple's push for "more realistic" emojis, it's absolutely disastrous for small font-size readability.
This is where Microsoft's implementations were much better.
(They guaranteed a black-and-white version... that could then be
colored just like
any other
letter.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by phillipgessert
Honestly it’s probably easier to just embed an emoji font than it would be to compile a list of devices that don’t need you to.
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Agreed. If it's very important to the text, you'll most likely want to embed a very specific font just for those symbols.
Treat it just like you would if you were inserting very rare characters from a specific language, like I discussed in:
Or the gibbous moons (🌔🌖) and vinegar (🜊) symbols in:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91
Do you happen to have a test epub which uses the emojis you are interested in?? It might be easier for us to test on some of the devices we have instead of just randomly trying to guess.
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Yeah, that sounds like a good idea too.
