What authority assigns the "short" names of the Emoji?

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

Discourse uses things like :``fries: to include images like (in place of, say 1F35F FRENCH FRIES ). I gather the :name: string is called a “short code”, but what authority assigns those names? I don’t find it in any of the Unicode data dumps ( Index of /Public/UNIDATA )

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I don’t know that anyone is assigning short names.

But per the Unicode spec the name is

FRENCH FRIES

and the short word chosen is

FRIES

So maybe de-facto…

1. If the Unicode name for the Emoji is a single word, use that word

2. If the Unicode name for the Emoji is multiple words, pick one of those words

Which one, I can’t say… it’s clear that :french: would be a bad choice here

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

Well someone decided that U+1F346 AUBERGINE should be called :eggplant: and not :aubergine:, so I don’t think it’s one of those two. (I came asking about :fries: because that’s another UK / US difference.)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Well, the US is correct, I think you mean

I’d expect there to be a Japanese bias due to the origin of Emoji. Perhaps Japanese people call eggplants Aubergines? Apparently Nasu (茄子 or ナス?) is the Japanese word for “eggplant”… so I dunno.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@elijah

someone decided

we should add an alias there, feel free to send a PR

[Mittineague]

@codinghorror

Perhaps Japanese people call eggplants Aubergines

Seems it is a legitimate alternative name, though I sure never heard of it before
And it isn’t the Japanese, but the Brits!

Eggplant

Anyway, I thought the images were “mapped” so basically any :word: could be used for any image.

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

I put this in meta for a good reason. Did Discourse name them or did they come from somewhere else? What authority did Discourse go to? Did you keep records? There are a lot of sites that offer guides to emoji and include these names, but I thought since Discourse implemented them, someone here may have an official reference s/he consulted. If no one knows, I can go ask elsewhere.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@elijah

someone here may have an official reference s/he consulted

The official ref is the filenames we got from emojione, twitter,google and github that extracted the images out of the apple emojis.

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

From which I take it the “authority” is Apple or came through Apple. That is if everyone is using the same names from the same ultimate source.

It’s not the answer I was hoping to find, but if that’s it, I’ll have to accept it.

[Mittineague]

With the modal selector knowing exact names isn’t really required.
True, it would be more convenient, but I doubt if members use more than a handful of them and they should get to know their favorites in short time no?

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

I have built several Unicode tools for my own use. I wanted to extend my own tools with this functionality. The only way it affects Discourse is that I’m likely to be cutting and pasting the output into Discourse forums.

[downey (Michael Downey)]

@elijah

but what authority assigns those names?

The Unicode Technical Report process. UTR #51 is coordinated by Mark Davis at Google and Peter Edberg at Apple. Details on how to provide feedback is in the “Status” paragraph of the UTR:

http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

UTR#51 deals with emoji, but they don’t seem to deal with assigning short codes. It is merely vaguely touched on in the section on Input:

http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Input

In some input systems, a word or phrase bracketed by colons is used to explicitly pick emoji characters. Thus typing in “I saw an #x3a;ambulance:” is converted to “I saw an ”. For completeness, such systems might support all of the full Unicode names, such as :first quarter moon with face: for . Spaces within the phrase may be represented by _, as in the following:

“my didn’t work”

→

“my didn’t work”.

However, in general the full Unicode names are not especially suitable for that sort of use; they were designed to be unique identifiers, and tend to be overly long or confusing.

However while works here: other names like :french_fries: do not.

[Mittineague]

@elijah

other names like :french_fries: do not.

Maybe your not thinking of Emoji, but unicode?
eg.
🍟

[elijah (Eli the Bearded)]

The colorful images are replacements for Unicode characters, but both are emoji.

It is starting to look like the names have been arbitrarily assigned by contributors to gemoji, a tool which creates png images from the Apple truetype font ("/System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttf", not included in the package).

github/gemoji