Re: Entering emojis

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 23:12:12 +0200
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>, 
> 	Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > (Unrelatedly, almost no smileys display on my macOS machine, but I
> > believe this is a known issue.)
> 
> Why exactly are emojis broken on macOS?

What exactly is broken?  You say "almost no smileys", but don't
provide any details: which ones work and which ones don't?  How about
submitting a bug report with all the details, so we could investigate
and try to fix that before the release?

> I'm surprised to learn that I have to say:
> 
>     (set-fontset-font t 'emoji
>                       '("Apple Color Emoji" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)
> 
> Is that correct?

Not sure, because I think other users of macOS said they get this
automatically.  Is this in "emacs -Q"?  (Once again, a detailed bug
report is sorely needed.)

> Why can't we just do that automatically?

I don't know why the macOS font backend doesn't find this font in your
case, it's something that should be investigated.

If you are asking why we don't put the above in Emacs explicitly, then
it's for the same reason we don't have such an explicit setting with
Segoe UI Emoji for MS-Windows, nor mention any other proprietary fonts
in our sources: we don't want to promote those proprietary fonts.

> I think that most users will just assume that emojis are broken and move
> on.  Maybe some will soldier on and find the fix.  I very nearly didn't.

I hope we will indeed be able to find the reason(s) and fix whatever
needs fixing, if we can.  Please help by providing the details.

> The NEWS entry on this is also not very useful, as it gives:
> 
>     (set-fontset-font t 'emoji
>                       '("My New Emoji Font" . "iso10646-1") nil 'prepend)
> 
> But there is of course no such font "My New Emoji Font".

Of course.  Why should you think this fake font name is a name of a
real font?

> Also, and I'm sorry in advance, but can we please change the text to
> something understandable?
> 
>      ** New character script 'emoji' has been created.
>      Various blocks of codepoints have been split out of the 'symbol'
>      script into their own 'emoji' script to allow easier specification of
>      their treatment.  Which codepoints are treated as emoji is derived
>      from the Unicode specifications.
> 
> Uh, what?  I have no idea what practical difference any of the words in
> the above would make.  Blocks of codepoints?  What is a 'symbol' script?
> Am I a horrible programmer and human being if I don't know what any of
> this means?
> 
> Maybe I have a general concept of some of these things, but not enough
> to know how this affects me as a user.  Did emojis already work, but
> they are now just better?  Are emojis an entirely new feature in Emacs
> 28?  Do they work even a little bit in Emacs 27?  Do they work, but are
> half-broken?  Do they work perfectly?
> 
> The entry after start talking about Zero Width Joiners and like,
> seriously people, can we just *really* dumb this down to something like:
> 
>     *** Emojis now display nicely under X Windows and macOS.
> 
> Or like:
> 
>     *** Emacs can display 50 new Emojis and also with skin tones.
> 
> Or whatever the above is supposed to mean.  You can then of course go
> into whatever low-level technical details you want, but please at least
> explain first in casual terms what this even is.
> 
> Unless of course this is only of interest to actual Unicode experts, in
> which case ignore me and carry on.

Frankly, I think the level of sarcasm here is a bit overboard.  The
issue is indeed highly technical, and if one pretends not to know what
Emoji are, nor how their support before Emacs 28 was lacking, and if
you never tried to customize your fontsets to support Emoji (or any
other character) better, then yes, it's easy to conclude that the
above is useless.

Anyway, I tried to clarify that entry as best I could, I hope it's an
improvement.