TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
How can I add emojis to a story?
It turns out that it is the only way of expressing emotions in the modern world.
Seriously, though: I've got some text messages in a story, and an emoji or two would not be out of place.
thanks,
- io
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Comments
Which way?
The traditional way would be plain ASCII: :-) :-( |-( and so on
Or you can use unicode: ☹ ☺
Just copy them from https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html - you can also enter them in numerical form:
☺☺Directly copying the 1F... codes failed with a varnish cache error.
Using links to include emojis
You can, of course do as others have suggested and bring them in as jpgs, but that requires storing those jpgs on site here. I prefer to simply copy the image link and use the insert image button and paste the link.
You do need to make sure that you get the link from a compatible list. I use https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/smilies-56460aca-...
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Remember your reader
You have no idea where in the world your reader is, what language they speak or what character set their text is in. You also have no idea what they are reading on, be it a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop, what operating system is in use and what character sets have been loaded.
You cannot guarantee that anything other than plain ASCII will be rendered the same way you see it, or at all. For that reason it is probably best to use ASCII emojiis since they will be available to all.
Even if the emojiis are displayed in any format you still cannot guarantee that your reader will understand them, since they do not constitute an international language with consistent meanings between countries or ethnic groups, any more than hand gestures do in conversations.
Emojiis are constructs from the Far East where the language is composed of ideograms rather than phonic symbols. They work better in that environment but, as noted above, may not have the same meanings elsewhere.
This is one reason that I only use ASCII in my own stories where I can. I use italics and very occasionally bold since I cannot be sure that anything else I use will be comprehensible to my readers.
Penny
Thanks to you both
I'll go with ASCII -- the images are cute, but I don't need cute.
thanks again!
- io
Alternate method?
One quick thought would be to set up the emojis you wanted to use, screen capture them, and then insert them as direct images in the story where appropriate?
Not sure if there's a limit to how many image references/uploads per story can be done...
Unicode
Unicode works fine in stories (and doesn't work in comments)
just put the emoji you want in the story and it'll work
On windows, (win + . ) brings up the insert panel which has a pool of "common" emoji on it, for everything else you can copy them from somewhere like emojipedia (which also shows what it looks like on lots of diferent platforms)
Not true
You are making an assumption that every reader has a device which can read, interpret and display text encoded as Unicode. Absolutely not true.
Some use UTF-16, others use UTF-8 and most of those will have included only a subset of the required glyphs, usually those which relate to the character set the reader uses, such as en_GB.UTF-8 (my own). That one does not include emojis. For that, I'd have to (probably) download and install a suitable Japanese character set - assuming I can work out which one I would need.
Apart from that there are many devices which do not understand UTF-8 or UTF-16. Most of these are old but still functional. Not everyone has or is able to have the latest and greatest.
Penny
«Unicode» encodings
So far, every web page I’ve seen from BigCloset specifies in the HTML that it’s using utf-8, and AFAIK the more widely used browsers all obey that. As Penny Lane points out, that doesn’t guarrantee that the particular Unicode character you’re interested in is in your reader’s browser’s or your OS’s fonts; in my browser, it prints a little box with the hex code if it doesn’t have the character in its font set.
The issue comes if the text that was uploaded to BigCloset used a different encoding, such as one of the Windows "code pages" (e.g., CP-1252) or ISO-8859; I don’t know how we users can tell BigCloset what encoding the text we upload uses. I have posted a fair amount of stuff using UTF-8, and have not had a problem, at least in stories and comments. I think there may be an issue with titles that are a link to a story or post, since I’ve seen weird stuff there -- but when you go to the story, the same text is rendered correctly. I suspect that there’s some piece of the software that BigCloset uses that doesn’t handle UTF-8 correctly.
(I don’t think you need to worry about UTF-16; if a page is in UTF-16 but your browser thinks it’s UTF-8 or something, the entire page will be gibberish.)
Apropos article
I must admit that I was surprised to see this relevant article in The Register this morning.
That emoji may not mean what you think it means.
The comments are also interesting.
Penny
Maybe just forget about rendering/displaying ...
... emojis. Put them into your characters' texts as plain (English) text, but set them off with 'curly braces' ({}) like so:
"Hey friend! Glad {smile emoji} you are home. It's where the {heart emoji} is. Still up to your tricks {smiling devil emoji}{smile emoji}{laughing face emoji}?"
This may carry through the 'flavor' of the text-messages-with-emojis without giving you, text rendering systems, and your readers a lot of pain. Just had the thought - such {emojis} should survive (automatic) language translations and text-to-speech systems.
Dang. I tried suggesting 'angle/pointy brackets' - and the HTML processor here ate them! Yeah, we can look up the HTML escape sequences ...