Android Question Android EmojiCompat

[nwhitfield]

Is there an easy way to use EmojiCompat in B4A?

Emoji Compatibility | Views | Android Developers

Emoji support library helps keep Android devices up to date with the latest emoji.

developer.android.com

 

[DonManfred]

com.android.support libraries are deprecated.

You probably mean
androidx.emoji.text.EmojiCompat

 

[nwhitfield]

So, no easy way to bring up to date emoji to user's devices, as far as I can see? My first thought was an attributed string, but I guess that once a character with an emoji codepoint is spotted, Android will just takeover and use the device emoji font, rather than any one that I bundle with the app.

 

[DonManfred]

I guess you can use the fonts bundled using CSBuilder,

 

[Erel]

Which problem are you trying to solve?

You can always add a custom emoji font and use it instead of the built-in font.

 

[nwhitfield]

Well, two things. Firstly, I'd like to be able to use an updated emoji font that includes all the latest additions, so that people will see the emoji even on older devices.

Secondly, it would be preferable if we could use the same emojiset across website and apps, for consistency. On the website, we'll be using Joypixels 6 when the update goes live.

I thought the only way to substitute the emoji font was by using the emoji-compat tools?

 

[Erel]

You can use different fonts. It is simple.
However it will not affect the keyboard. If the keyboard shows emojies then their appearance will depend on the keyboard implementation.

Code to create string with emojies: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/t...e-only-emojis-in-the-string.91247/post-576734

 

[nwhitfield]

So, for a string that may have a mix of normal text and emoji, I'd have to iterate over each character to see if it was an emoji or not, and build the string character by character. Straightforward enough to do, but I shall have to see what the performance hit is on long messages.

 

[nwhitfield]

Well, I have this bit of code using CSBuilder and the JoyPixels Android font, which mostly works

    For Each point In cp
        If IsEmojiCodePoint(point) Then
            If emojiFont Then
                cs.Append(UTS(point))
            Else
                cs.pop.Typeface(joypixels).Append(UTS(point))
                emojiFont = True
            End If
        Else
            If Not(emojiFont) Then
                cs.Append(Chr(point))
            Else
                cs.Pop.Typeface(default).Append(Chr(point))
                emojiFont = False
            End If
        End If
    Next

However while it's replacing most emoji with the JoyPixels one (at the cost of a 22Mb payload for the app), it's not handling them all. Specifically the first one message in this screenshot should be the Transgender Flag, which is included in JoyPixels 6, and is a UTF sequence with zero join width. So on devices without the right symbol in their emjoi font, this is what you're supposed to see - a blank flag, followed by a transgender symbol.

I'm not sure why, however, when I am using the right font, it doesn't collapse that UTF sequence to display the correct one.

 

[Erel]

Are you sure that the font file doesn't include non-emojies chars? Try it without CSBuilder.

 

[nwhitfield]

Aha; you're right - the font does include the basic characters, and using it that way instead of building the string one code point at a time does indeed display the new emoji, like the transgender flag, correctly (and, of course, the accordion, also new in Unicode 13)

However, when displaying ordinary text, it's doing something weird with the space character, which is irksome - see attached screen.

So, I think in the interests of processing speed the best compromise will be to use the JoyPIxels font only when a message is flagged 'bigemoji' by the server, which means it has 10 or fewer characters, so spacing won't matter so much (and I expect most of those messages to be largely emoji anyway)