howto display / enable apple utf8 emoji on ed/x/ubuntu gnu/linux

simples

aptitude install ttf-ancient-fonts

you should now see

• BACK ON TOP SOON as 🔙 🔛 🔝 🔜

instead of something like

F0F0F0F0 F0F0F0F0 F0F0F0F0 F0F0F0F0

thanks to

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/639552/how-to-get-apple-color-emojis-to-work-on-ubuntu
• http://sourcedigit.com/9978-install-use-emoji-characters-ubuntu-14-04-ttf-ancient-fonts-package/

see also

• http://raptalk.org/left-boy-back-on-top-soon/

#unicode 8.0 #utf8 #diversity and #gender #emoji modifiers

Unicode 8.0 (and v6 and v7) (UTF-8)

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

diversity and gender emoji modifiers

• http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity

I hadn’t realised Unicode was that comprehensive and that

in Unicode 8.0, there are a total of 1,282 emoji, which are represented using 1,051 code points.

Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2, UCS-4 and URIs

Unicode can be confusing !

For a start there are a number of different encodings such as :

• UTF-8 (for example € in UTF-8 is 0xE2 0x82 0xAC)
• UTF-16 (which uses surrogate pairs to represent "characters" outside the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)
• UCS-2 (a predecessor of UTF-16)
• UCS-4

A RFC-2396 URI must be encoded / escaped using UTF-8 (and %hex-values) so if you want to acccess a web page called

• http://my.host/€.php

the URI will be

• http://my.host/%E2%82%AC.php

and different browsers seem to work with Unicode URIs in different ways !

• Safari works with both (€.php and %E2%82%AC.php) and helpfully (?) redisplays %E2%82%AC.php as €.php in the address bar
• Firefox converts €.php (sometimes incorrectly to %80.php) so you can only use / see %E2%82%AC.php
• IE works with both (€.php and %E2%82%AC.php) but leaves both versions unchanged in the address bar

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