Icons that don't have Unicode – what to do?
Eimantas Paškonis
Posts: 91
Things like "heart", "flag", "envelope" or "star" have their unicode. But things like "burger" menu, "share" or "tag" icons don't. What do I do? If I leave unicode empty, then at least Illustrator CS6 treats these glyphs as unknown and won't allow to change their family or weight via the menus.
I know that with San Francisco, Apple utilized Private Use area for some glyphs. Is that the solution? Is there a difference which numbers I use? Can I just start from U+F0000 and go forward?
I know that with San Francisco, Apple utilized Private Use area for some glyphs. Is that the solution? Is there a difference which numbers I use? Can I just start from U+F0000 and go forward?
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Comments
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You have several options:
- Use the Private Use Area for characters which are otherwise unencoded. This has the advantage that the glyphs are accessible in just about any app, although the convenience of that access may not be great.
- Make the special characters as unencoded alternates (via some OpenType feature) of characters that are encoded. Then you have to decide which character to make them an alternate of.
- Use some incorrect Unicode and encode them directly, in the wrong slots (like for example A-Z).
- If the entire font is such special characters, you could use the Microsoft "symbol font" approach, which is essentially a modified version of option #1, with some of the convenience of #3.
The last time I made a symbol font it was ~ entirely characters without legitimate codepoints, and intended mostly for non-professionals, so I used option 3. If I was doing those again today I would go with #4.
With approaches 2 and 3, you will get your characters turning into something wrong when the user changes fonts. Possibly with 1 (although quite possibly they’d just get notdefs, depending on fallback). Not sure about 4—that behavior may be dependent on the OS (or the app, in the case of Adobe apps).
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Most word processors and desktop publishing applications won't recognise characters without a codepoint assigned to them, the characters without codepoints can only be accessed through open type features.Characters which are not in Unicode standard may be assigned codepoints in one of the Private Use Areas, that is what they are for and this gets around that problem but it also has disadvantages.Characters in the Private Use Areas will be different in each font and may not even exist, so their use will only be valid for the font which has the appropriate characters defined.You can use them in your documents but if you pass that document to someone else who hasn't got your font then those characters will disappear or get replaced by a box with a question mark inside.Having said that if you publish the document as a PDF file then it will preserve the characters as you intended.0
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In the case of "burger", who not use 1F96A SANDWICH? Burgers are technically sandwiches, and Unicode symbols as shown do not dictate the actual design of a particular symbol in use.
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Better yet, use 1F354 HAMBURGER.
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@André G. Isaak -- Hmm. Acrobat search did not turn up "burger" so I guess I should have been more specific. I thought it would do partials but obviously not. Thanks for posting the correction.
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Eimantas Paškonis said:
Those two suggestions stem from the thought that it is better to get notdefs than wrong glyphs. This would be my preference, at least.0 -
@Thomas Linard
Is just putting all icons inside emoji range ok?0 -
Symbol fonts should be handled with care in the age of digital text. There was a bank a few years back that had their hamburger menu icon replaced by a bonafide hamburger emoji (yum!) on certain devices. You never know when something might override the specified web fonts, and digital text is not just *seen* but also interpreted semantically by screen readers, index- and search algorithms, etc, and a user might come along that has disabled custom fonts, or with a browser that doesn’t support certain font formats (some even outright disable web fonts). The all-encompassing symbol webfont is an especially terrible idea.0
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1. make sure you consult the latest Unicode code charts for reference. New symbols get freshly encoded all the way.2. Don’t get misguided by the misuse of the term emoji. Unfortunately, it is used at Unicode nowadays indifferently for all bunches of symbols and pictographic characters, which in fact are no emotion-signs, but rather just ideograms of various kinds.3. The utilization of the PUA is a viable possibility if you mind the usage scenario of your font. If it is to get just yourself and your folks to work on something, then it may well be a good workaround. If your goal is to facilitate content getting transmitted and exchanged, than it is likely to be a rather bad idea.I have been thinking for years about making the good old German Bockwurst symbol a localized alternative variant of – what??– Still thinking, still thinking.1
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For hamburger, assuming you mean the UI symbol and not the sandwich, you can use 2261 ≡. At least then it'll fall back to something similar if the font is missing. If you already include that as a mathematical symbol, that won't work. That doesn't help with the other symbols though. I can't think of anything similar to the share icon.
Edit: Or this one ☰ 2630. This alchemical symbol might be an acceptable fallback for share. 🜉 1F709 Tag? ⛉ 26C9 ☖ 2616
Quick emoji history: The emo from emoji has nothing to do with emotions. Emoticon is a portmanteau of emotion and icon. E is japanese for picture. Moji is japanese for character/glyph/letter.The original emoji sets from Japanese phone companies didn't have a large percentage of facial expressions. The had a lot of the weather and transportation symbols that still exist in the current emoji set. The first big emoji set (180) came out in 1999 and wasn't that heavy on smileys and had a poo symbol. I think Docomo expanded it to about 1700 and au/SoftBank copied them with their own encodings and a few additions. When the Unicode proposal was made about a decade ago, the emojis submitted were a combination of all the phone companies' custom encoded sets. It's almost identical to that initial SoftBank 1700 set.8 -
The thing is that I'm not making a symbol font. It's text font but I want to go extra mile and add some icons. Maybe it's ultimately pointless since people will use separate icon sets anyway?0
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Another question – if I put a thing like Speech Bubble into emoji range (1F4AC) instead of generic symbols (1F5E9), would this mean that default (Apple/Android/Facebook etc.) emojis would be overridden?
In my eyes that means one shouldn't put anything into emoji range to avoid consistency issues.0 -
Eimantas Paškonis said:...would this mean that default (Apple/Android/Facebook etc.) emojis would be overridden?.
Huh? Only in text specifically formatted with your font. So, generally, no.0 -
If you want to make Private Use Area characters easier for users to access, consider using custom shortcodes. I did that with Canada1500. In this case, for safety, I needed special symbols to fall back to something human readable. For example, the radiation symbol falls back to \radiation\. They're simple OpenType substitutions. I think backslashes are a good choice as they have little use outside of programming. I did something similar with Gargle, Meloche and Sunday Evening but I don't recommend using {[()]} as shortcodes could be activated unintentionally.
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