asked 2014-09-30 17:28:06 +0300
Hi,
with some of the SMS that I receive, rectangular characters with a cross through them are displayed instead of the actual character. I would guess that they should be smilies. Are there some known problems with how those are encoded?
answered 2014-09-30 17:46:40 +0300
A font with all of the smiley face characters is included with the "keyboard-custom-emoji" package from here:
https://openrepos.net/content/penguin/emoji-keyboard
After you install that package, the phone will need to be restarted before you'll be able to see the fonts rendered correctly.
(I chose to disable the keyboard by using the "Settings" application because I was only interested in being able to see the fonts.)
@steabert: It's common sense to just use :-) in an SMS of course. Problem isn't what you use... problem is what the other person uses. You cannot control that, and Emojis have been a successful markting thing for quite a while now. It wouldn't be too far fetched to include them.
ossi1967 ( 2014-09-30 17:54:15 +0300 )editI tried the emoji keyboard, but for me it felt rather slow, and I really don't need a whole line of emoji's to browse. I tried to follow the AndroidEmoij.ttf recipe, but that failed (the font has been changed somehow and has no emoji), but instead I used Symbola.ttf from my linux computer (available from this package: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Symbola.zip). That worked great! :)
steabert ( 2014-10-05 18:06:11 +0300 )editanswered 2014-09-30 17:37:44 +0300
AFAIK there's just no font to render them.
:) I'm not sure I understand you: You descibe such a well-known issue in your original question. And it's not the encoding, it's the rendering (missing font).
See also:
https://together.jolla.com/questions/scope:all/sort:activity-desc/tags:emoji/page:1/query:emojis/
ossi1967 ( 2014-09-30 17:51:45 +0300 )editwhat I meant was that I didn't know what kind of character would be causing this. I only guessed they might be some kind of smilies based on the position in the sentence I had. So I was seeking confirmation that this was some kind of smily. I had not heard of emoji's before though... are they unicode characters? Yes, sorry, encoding/rendering, I'm not that good with that kind of terminology :)
steabert ( 2014-09-30 17:57:23 +0300 )edit@steabert: Well, fortunately they are standardized in Unicode, so there's some interoperability. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
A problem, though, is that while Unicode can provide a general description of the character and maybe a reference glyph, that doesn't mean that a "smiling face" looks the same on all devices - the same way the letter "capital F" doenst look the same and differs in shape and size, depending on the font. See this table:
http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode
The first line "GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES" is rendered as something I'd identify as a happy smile on most platforms, while Apple and Twitter create something I'd interpret as grim and not so nice. That's why I prefer :-) ... It's more precise.
ossi1967 ( 2014-09-30 18:18:15 +0300 )editAsked: 2014-09-30 17:28:06 +0300
Seen: 943 times
Last updated: Sep 30 '14
