Re: Entering emojis

[Stefan Kangas]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> (Unrelatedly, almost no smileys display on my macOS machine, but I
> believe this is a known issue.)

Why exactly are emojis broken on macOS?  I'm surprised to learn that I
have to say:

    (set-fontset-font t 'emoji
                      '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

Is that correct?  Why can't we just do that automatically?

I think that most users will just assume that emojis are broken and move
on.  Maybe some will soldier on and find the fix.  I very nearly didn't.

The NEWS entry on this is also not very useful, as it gives:

    (set-fontset-font t 'emoji
                      '("My New Emoji Font" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)

But there is of course no such font "My New Emoji Font".

---

Also, and I'm sorry in advance, but can we please change the text to
something understandable?

     ** New character script 'emoji' has been created.
     Various blocks of codepoints have been split out of the 'symbol'
     script into their own 'emoji' script to allow easier specification of
     their treatment.  Which codepoints are treated as emoji is derived
     from the Unicode specifications.

Uh, what?  I have no idea what practical difference any of the words in
the above would make.  Blocks of codepoints?  What is a 'symbol' script?
Am I a horrible programmer and human being if I don't know what any of
this means?

Maybe I have a general concept of some of these things, but not enough
to know how this affects me as a user.  Did emojis already work, but
they are now just better?  Are emojis an entirely new feature in Emacs
28?  Do they work even a little bit in Emacs 27?  Do they work, but are
half-broken?  Do they work perfectly?

The entry after start talking about Zero Width Joiners and like,
seriously people, can we just *really* dumb this down to something like:

    *** Emojis now display nicely under X Windows and macOS.

Or like:

    *** Emacs can display 50 new Emojis and also with skin tones.

Or whatever the above is supposed to mean.  You can then of course go
into whatever low-level technical details you want, but please at least
explain first in casual terms what this even is.

Unless of course this is only of interest to actual Unicode experts, in
which case ignore me and carry on.