On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Neal McBurnett <n...@bcn.boulder.co.us> wrote: > It seems that the popularity of "texting" has led to a redefinition in many > influential quarters of what text is. I'm now thinking that at least some > emoji are downright evil (from a font perspective) - in color and animated! > That makes this thread even more esoteric than I thought, though perhaps > still of interest to documentation folks, who are perhaps more interested in > fonts and characters than most.
Emojis defining their own colors isn't evil (animating them is evil though). But no, the real evil of Emoji is that they are subject to the whims of whatever font designer happened to design the font you are using. Compare: https://twitter.com/mattboch/status/461502603147227136 (top row is iOS emoji font, bottom row is how android displays the exact same characters) So, true story, my girlfriend uses iOS and often sent me yellow hearts in her texts. One day I asked her "Why do you keep sending me this hairy scrotum?" She was mortified when she found out what it looked like for me, and then after that we spent a long time comparing emojis and deciding on which ones were "safe". So you can see, all it takes is one mistake, one little inconsistency, and then suddenly the picture you think you're sending comes out looking totally different on the other side. Emoji, by their very nature, give you precisely zero ability to predict what any given one will look like for any given viewer on any given platform. Although I admit the emoji fonts that render small monochrome icons look actually a little cute to me (I find the iOS ones garish in the extreme), still the fact remains that the vast majority of desktops are rendering these characters as squares with numbers inside them, so really they should not be used. Maybe at some future point the fonts will have better support for this and it won't be such a horrible situation, but right now it's really bad and should be avoided. If you really, really, really are in love with iOS emojis and really insist on using them in web pages, *please* *please* *please* take a screenshot of it and then save it as a PNG and include the PNG in the website instead. This way you can be sure that everybody will see the correct image, no matter what platform they are using. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~papercuts-ninja Post to : papercuts-ninja@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~papercuts-ninja More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
