UTF-8 emojis in Gemtext
I wonder what people's views are on these? I note that some people use UTF-8 emojis in Gemtext, even in headings that might end up in a search or aggregator. Lagrange handles these without any additional config, but some clients don't. Amfora (on my Linux system) doesn't, without additional font configuration.
So is it safe to use these? They do add a bit of zing to pages, but making folks install additional fonts seems a bit cheeky.
Sorry if this has been discussed before.
Feb 17 · 3 months ago · 👍 drcouzelis
4 Comments ↓
🌆 skyjake [...] · Feb 17 at 14:38:
is it safe to use these?
It is not 100% "safe" in the sense that some clients, environments, and platforms do not support a full set of Emoji.
Unicode is a moving target and they keep adding new Emoji every year. The older the Unicode standard, the wider it is supported.
When it comes to Emoji, I would recommend using them sparingly and never in any critical role. Rule of thumb: make the content understandable even if all the Emoji are missing.
🚀 lars_the_bear [OP] · Feb 17 at 15:33:
@skyjake Thanks, that makes sense. I notice that Lagrange handles many characters that Amfora (in X terminal) does not. Does it have some glyph-handling logic of its own? Or is the limitation perhaps in the terminal fonts?
🌆 skyjake [...] · Feb 17 at 17:30:
Terminals are limited both by the font they use and also the locale character encoding. Nowadays terminals usually use UTF-8, though, so it's mostly up to the user's chosen font.
Lagrange has pretty standard Unicode functionality that comes mainly from the Harfbuzz library, however it doesn't support Zero-Width Joiner sequences that are needed for many modern Emoji, especially for different variants.
Plain text ain’t always so plain, and hasn’t been for a while, but I’d say emoji use is fully mainstream and non-technical users will expect emojis to just work, moreso than, say, zalgo text, even though that has been around for longer.