Weāve started using emojis in topic titles a fair amount on our forum, and have run into issues with cross-browser consistency. The emojis in the topic title donāt get converted to their discourse equivalent. The same issue also occurs when the topic title is displayed in ālatestā or other lists.
Original report
For example, if I use the unicode emoji (āwoman studentā): in the post body, it gets turned into two different Discourse emoji. This is fine, not ideal, but at least itās consistent across browsers.
However, if I put the same unicode emoji in the topic title (see the title of this topic), it doesnāt get converted to the discourse equivalent, which means appearance varies massively between browsers/OS.
The same issue also occurs when the topic title is displayed in ālatestā or other lists.
This requires a much more recent version of Unicode Emoji than we support. The whole concept of ācombine Unicode characters to get different Emojiā is fairly new; you may want to look up the history there.
In general I would avoid using Unicode combined character emoji at the moment.
Iāve just noticed that the same thing happens in the āpreviewā pane of the composer. So it would seem that the javascript emoji āunescaperā doesnāt recognise unicode emojis at all. (Titles & previews are parsed client-side, baked posts are parsed server-sideā¦ I think)
This is very much by design not a bug, unassigning this work not sure what you are doing here @sam.
My earlier comments were about combined Unicode emoji like skin tone and what not, we will get to that but no plans to convert Unicode emoji to PNG images in topic titles that is madness.
In that case, maybe the normalisation should go the other way for titles - at the moment if I put :panda_face: in the title of a topic (see this topic), it gets converted into a PNG.
However, as you pointed out, that breaks down in emails, notifications and the <title> tag of the page. So maybe :panda_face should be converted into its unicode equivalent for titles?
Then again, that sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of gain #bikeshedding
This is a bug, we already have a āspecialā Unicoded title for topics that @techAPJ added for meta tags and other spots. what we are missing is normalization, I know this cause I know exactly how title code works and where the normalization fits, will assign to myself and sort this out
Fine but we are in agreement, emoji should go Unicode in title it is way more consistent and easier to deal with than embedding PNGs in a string. This also helps email titles, browser page titles, etc.
We expect PNGs in post bodies, not so much in post titlesā¦
in the post body, it gets turned into two different Discourse emoji. This is fine, not ideal, but at least itās consistent across browsers.
