Creating custom yellow handshake emojis with zero-width joiners
74 points
1 day ago
| 4 comments
| blog.alexbeals.com
| HN
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xg15
1 day ago
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Is there any specification on how "far" a zero-width joiner can reach? I thought a ZWJ would only affect the codepoints directly adjacent to it, but here we have sequence of 5 codepoints and only one ZWJ for all of them (which is also the only codepoint that signals that "special treatment" should be applied here).

So how would a parser know all five codepoints make up a grapheme cluster and not just the inner three?

Edit: Ok, didn't realize the "Fitzpatrick" codepoints are modifiers that I guess always refer to the previous codepoint. So there is essentially an "operator precedence" defined between modifiers and ZWJs.

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EricBetts
21 hours ago
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I did a project in a similar vein for family emoji: https://familyemojimaker.netlify.app/ (https://gitlab.com/bettse/family)
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dado3212
19 hours ago
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Unfortunately most of the benefit of this was undone by Apple's rollback of their family emoji rendering to just be shapes :/. Cool UX though!
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araes
16 hours ago
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Was curious whether the Zero Width Joiner was ad-hoc with anything provided, or a long list of specific combinations. Turned out it was specific combinations, and the list is rather impressive.

[1] https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-zwj-sequences.html#1f...

Unicode.org has a list of the recommendations [1]. It's somewhat long. Takes a bit to load. There's also a bunch that are "really" long. "man facepalming: medium-light skin tone" is great. U+1F926 U+1F3FC U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F Now I can do a Picard in Unicode. Now if only they had "man who is bald facepalming." Pretty sure that means adding U+1F9B2 somewhere, maybe U+1F468 U+200D U+1F9B2.

U+1F468 U+200D U+1F9B2 U+1F926 U+1F3FC U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F kind of works.

Also like U+1F9B9 U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F, "man who is supervillain". Current version looks more like Minions movie, and suggested sample looks more like "mime vampire who is stuck in plastic action figure container"

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TacticalCoder
23 hours ago
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"Unicode is just too complex to ever be secure"

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2000/0715.html...

Wise words from Bruce Schneier from 2000.

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