Anyone know how to get emoji characters to display on Windows Vista? I see emoji characters on Twitter but they display as boxes on my computer. With Firefox the boxes have little code numbers.
Emojis seem to be an Apple iphone thing.
I can get them to display on my Android phone using the Emoji Codec app.
You can try using a font with better Unicode coverage-- Arial contains nearly every Unicode character, I believe.
The OS isn’t the issue, by the way, the issue is your font doesn’t have characters that match the ones Twitter’s trying to display.
Edit: I spoke too soon, sorry. I found a patch from Microsoft to put Emoji characters in the Segoe font in Windows 7 you can download here. It doesn’t specifically mention Vista, but I’m pretty sure that Vista also uses Segoe as the default font, so it might be worth a try.
Edit2: also notice that just updates one font, Segoe. If your browser isn’t using that font, you still won’t see the emoji on web pages.
Thanks Blakeyrat. I’ll try updating Segoe UI and see if it works.
I haven’t been able to update the Segoe UI font in Vista but I don’t think it would have helped.
The emoji (or Japanese) symbols I wanted to display can be seen here. I can copy and paste tweets onto this site and display the emojis in that manner. So at this point there’s no way for Windows Vista to display emojis automatically.
Turns out they were originally designed for the Japanese cell phone market and then Apple made them a standard feature on iphone. A lot of people, mainly teens and young adults use them on twitter. Android doesn’t support emojis but they can be displayed using a special app.
I really hope that I am not the only one who understands only about two out of three words in the above posts.
excavating (for a mind)
Emoji are a special type of emoticon that use only one symbol. An emoticon is a text-based smiley. Emoji are text-based smileys. They’re similar to Wingdings.
It’s similar to how, even though we can’t display images here, I can still type stuff like “
•◘○.” The difference is that these characters exist in nearly every font, while emoji are special characters that tend to only exist in Japanese fonts made by Apple.
I’m not entirely sure why the OP thinks the Segoe UI upgrade won’t fix his problem. The same copy-and-paste method works with Japanese characters if you don’t have them installed. The characters are there, they just can’t be displayed. Add a way to display them, and, boom, you can see them.
The only real problem is making sure whatever program he has will use the new font. For Firefox, he may be better off using this GreaseMonkey script instead.
I think the issue isn’t the font, but that Microsoft is only “technically” making the update available for Windows 7 – meaning the installer probably refuses to work in Vista.
Maybe you could find a Windows 7 computer with the font update installed, then just copy the font files to your Vista computer? That’s probably the best bet. (And remember to set the web browser font to Segoe.)