&what;
April 25, 2014 8:27 AM   Subscribe

 
This looks awesomely helpful, nice find.
posted by brokkr at 8:31 AM on April 25, 2014


cool.
posted by signal at 8:32 AM on April 25, 2014


If you like this site, you might also enjoy Wikipedia's page on emoji, wherein I learned that Wikipedia parses emoji, so that you can find the page for 🍻, which is a redirection for Toast (honor).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:34 AM on April 25, 2014 [5 favorites]


This is great. Thank you.
posted by joannemerriam at 8:35 AM on April 25, 2014


I like it. Thanks for posting!
posted by Renoroc at 8:38 AM on April 25, 2014


What's in the box??
posted by grog at 8:39 AM on April 25, 2014


ಠ_ೊ

(This is, obviously, ΰ² _ΰ²  with a monocle.)
posted by ardgedee at 8:40 AM on April 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


The tool I prefer for this is Unicode Table. It's not quite as dynamic, but the presentation is beautiful and clear. Also they seem to be clever about web fonts so for instance you can see both races of snowman on a Mac. ⛇ has a posse, at least in their mysterious u2400 font.

To exterminate all rational thought, see Unicode frenzy.
posted by Nelson at 8:41 AM on April 25, 2014 [7 favorites]




nelson: Unicode Table is good, but so far I prefer and-what, if for no other reason than because it's more open to freeform exploration, and for being waaay more touchscreen-friendly.
posted by ardgedee at 8:43 AM on April 25, 2014


While this is cool (though I far prefer Nelson's table link) I still run into a lot of uses that my browsers simply can't display. There are already two on this page that display as those irritating boxes.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:45 AM on April 25, 2014


Unicode character recognition is occasionally useful.
posted by zamboni at 8:48 AM on April 25, 2014 [4 favorites]


It’s 2014. Why doesn’t Chrome support Emoji?

That's odd. I see them in Chrome. On the other hand, today's been a bit weird. Maybe I've developed magic powers?
posted by effbot at 8:54 AM on April 25, 2014


Potentially useful, but presently it returns only two characters (🍲,πŸ˜‹) for the culinary domain of "food" when even the most cursory search reveals seven times more characters than that. Hopefully the magnitude difference is not repeated in other domains.

Unsurprisingly, Mac OS (v10.8.5's) Character Viewer utility returns the same two Unicode characters &what does for "food".
posted by mistersquid at 9:08 AM on April 25, 2014


Also, pace wikipedia, beer is food.
posted by mistersquid at 9:12 AM on April 25, 2014


It doesn't show up for me, but we have an entity for "love hotel"? That's... handy. I guess?
posted by taz at 9:42 AM on April 25, 2014


> we have an entity for "love hotel"?

Emoji originated in Japan among a couple of their phone carriers; they didn't get added to Unicode until Apple and Google campaigned for it.

This also explains why there are so many Japanese snacks and relatively few Western foods (not even tacos, ffs).

But it doesn't fully explain that although there's an emoji for love hotel (🏩), there's no symbol for bed.

Emoji is weird.
posted by ardgedee at 9:57 AM on April 25, 2014 [2 favorites]


Emoji is weird, but the default version is really well drawn. You don't appreciate how well it's done until you try to do it yourself!
posted by cell divide at 10:13 AM on April 25, 2014


Excellent, I've already used this tool to find and put πŸ™ˆπŸ™‰πŸ™Š in an apropos spot on a web page of mine.
posted by mcstayinskool at 10:16 AM on April 25, 2014 [3 favorites]


The inclusion of emoji in Unicode was controversial. It's definitely helpful for standardization, but there's an argument emoji isn't a real written script under their standards of inclusion. Apple and Google were the ones who got it through in 2009. There's some reference links on the proposal here, the formal proposal is interesting reading. "Users treat Emoji as text and expect that they can be interchanged like any other element of text."
posted by Nelson at 10:24 AM on April 25, 2014


Couldn't get it to search for "pi"
posted by Obscure Reference at 10:26 AM on April 25, 2014


Oddly enough, a search for " pi" (with leading space) seems to work. Found this by accident while typing in search queries. Strange.
posted by exogenous at 10:46 AM on April 25, 2014


A search for πœ‹ worked. Nothing for ;-}
posted by sammyo at 10:51 AM on April 25, 2014


ΰΌ’
posted by nostrada at 11:38 AM on April 25, 2014


I started drawing weird things around other glyphs in shapecatcher and I got this ().

Best laugh I've had in a long time.
posted by plinth at 11:55 AM on April 25, 2014


Back in the big Unicode post I made a couple of years ago, I discovered that Chrome's font handling differs from Firefox and Safari's in an important way, which as far as I know is still true. Specifically, if your browser encounters a character on a page that doesn't have a glyph in the current font, Firefox and Safari will actually grab a character out of a different installed font that does have that glyph to replace it with, while Chrome will boringly draw the square. But those browsers don't do it perfectly either; on Mac, I found out that that system has a "fallback font" of last resort, which is just boxes with hex digits inside them, and it's known, from time to time to use characters from it even when there are installed other fonts with better characters.

It's worth noting that getemoji.com, in Firefox at least, doesn't actually show "emoji," which are color pictographs, but their Unicode versions, which are just glyphs, B&W. Firefox likely renders them, not out of any specific support, but because the current font (or another on the system) includes them. iOS Safari, on the other hand, will display the color pictographs.

I checked Android just now. Chrome on that platform does display emoji, possibly because of system font inclusion, and so does Android. And I checked in Desktop chrome just now and it is displaying the characters. But the only one of all these browsers that's displaying color pictographs for me is iOS Safari. (I haven't checked Mac; I don't have one up and going right now.)
posted by JHarris at 12:26 PM on April 25, 2014


πŸ’©
posted by Skwirl at 12:27 PM on April 25, 2014


What's in the box??

the only move
posted by thelonius at 12:38 PM on April 25, 2014


zamboni: It’s 2014. Why doesn’t Chrome support Emoji?

Weird, the version on my desktop computer, 24.0.1312.52 (portable install), fails to display a good number of emoji including the "toast" in the OP, while my iOS install renders the clinking glasses, and in color.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:40 PM on April 25, 2014


That's not a Chrome problem, and it isn't even Chrome's job.

Use a font that supports the characters, and the characters will display. As things are now it is the OS not the browser that primarily decides what fonts are available and which ones you prefer.
posted by idiopath at 4:45 PM on April 25, 2014


Emoji are essentially useless on a blue background, or on a "small" device, or for anyone with not-terrific eyesite.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:01 PM on April 25, 2014


That's not a Chrome problem, and it isn't even Chrome's job.

That's completely wrong. Chrome is most definitely at fault. I have the Symbola font installed, one of those fallback fonts that contains 7752 glyphs. I have opened this font in FontLab Studio to confirm that it contains a particular glyph in question (U+1D46F: MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL H.) And yet when I try to view a page with that glyph in Chrome (it is the first character of the copy of JHarris' Quivera post linked above), it's an empty replacement box. Chrome cannot properly figure out that a font exists with the given glyph and substitute it, as every other major browser can. It works fine in Firefox 28. It works fine in Opera 12.17. It even works fine in IE9. It does not work fine in Chrome 36. One of these things is not like the others.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:34 AM on April 26, 2014


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