Symbella variants

[Kappa]

I think I would really prefer "always displays as text" over "always displays as a consistent emoji image", but if "always displays as text" is impossible, "consistent emoji image" is better than "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you're taking your chances".

[Adelene]

I think I would really prefer "always displays as text" over "always displays as a consistent emoji image", but if "always displays as text" is impossible, "consistent emoji image" is better than "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you're taking your chances".

+1

[Throne3d]

I think an image of the symbol in a font that displays it as text would work to have "always displays as text"? I agree that it'd be neater if all the symbellas displayed as text.

[Kappa]

No, an image is an image, not text. Like, I guess we could craft custom SVGs for every symbella so they'd at least be vector images, but short of that, images and text have very different behaviour, and even then they're not identical.

[Throne3d]

… I understand that an image is an image, not text. Obviously the ideal solution would be to have it display in a consistent font that displays them all perfectly by simply adding a couple of lines of CSS, but if this is not possible, I would expect a vector image to be a better fallback than "tell all the devices to display it as an emoji" (at least it would be in my opinion), because the other one would have similar issues to "tell all the devices to display it as text" – some devices will not listen, some devices won't be able to do it, there will be variation anyway, that sort of thing.

Images can mostly be told to act like text anyway, I think – make them display inline for flow, make them have sizes in 'em' so they vary with font size / zoom, use vector images so they don't pixelate on zoom, add 'alt' text so screen-readers interpret them properly.

Edit: A web-font special case for symbellas may work, but I expect it to be ignored by various mobile devices. An image would be ugly (for various reasons, including lack of anti-aliasing and other processing that text goes through, I think, which makes it preferable, you know, not to use it) but may get around this issue. I agree, though: the web-font thing should probably be tried first in case it works.

[Unbitwise]

I thought "Surely people have figured this out already" and checked Stack Overflow, and all the advice I found is that the "variant selector" is the official way to do it.

For what it's worth, I prefer unwanted emoji rendering to gimmicks to replace text with images (e.g. you can't just copy & paste text with images in all settings).

[DanielH]

I don’t know how they do it, but EmojiOne is free (CC-BY), can be integrated into websites, and allows copy/pasting as though the images were text (looking at the source code, this is accomplished just with the alt text, not using SVGs). It also works on Opera and Chrome for Android, and I would be surprised if it didn’t work on iOS devices.

It isn’t ideal, and since we are also looking at different fonts it is probably possible to find one with no emoji support (or use an open-source one and remove emoji support from it, though I have no clue how to do that). If we can’t force text mode one way or another, though, EmojiOne or something like that might be the best option.

[Moriwen]

I'm on a Mac (using Firefox) so I checked EmojiOne real quick; the emojis on their demo page do indeed copy-paste like text, but some of them (e.g., the drums) make the little confused boxes my computer does when it doesn't recognize an emoji. (Not computer literate enough to say that more clearly. :P)

[PlainDealingVillain]

I think I would really prefer "always displays as text" over "always displays as a consistent emoji image", but if "always displays as text" is impossible, "consistent emoji image" is better than "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you're taking your chances".

+1

Also, on Mac 10.11.5 (El Capitan), Chrome 51, I see all the diamonds black, all the leaves as red, all the lightning bolts either as yellow or as featureless squares (2 and 4 are squares).