[GNC-dev] emojis everywhere, seeking understanding / clarity / opinion

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 7, 2018, at 1:08 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> On 07/04/2018 19:50, Buddha Buck wrote:
> 
> [much snipped]
> 
> thanks to JohnR too, BB's message was more fun to reply to
> 

;-), 😁

[SNIP]
>>> half for fun is this (.)(.) female breasts, an overweight man's chest or
>>> a pair of eyes ?  We think we know when we use them and they're often
>>> fine amongst friends ... but do they belong in an accounting application
>>> as accounting is, usually, formal in one sense or another and often used
>>> for communicating to people outside of our immediate social circle.
>>> 
>> The emoticon you gave is not an emoji, and is not standardized by the
>> Unicode Consortium. It seems a non-sequitor to this discussion.
> 
> Now *that* I find confusing.
> 
> Y'see, JohnR suggested every emoji had a single meaning, representation, etc OR that it wasn't anything to do with us if, say, someone represented someone badly in their own accounts.

It’s pretty simple: In my response to your saying that Buddha’s message was more fun to reply to, I used two “smiley faces”. The first is an emoticon, composed of ASCII (i.e. code points 0x20-0x7f) characters, the second an emoji, code point 0x1f601. The menu item that’s causing you such distress is for easily inserting the latter. For the technical details, see https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/index.html <https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/index.html>.

[SNIP]
> 
>> Besides, the "whole bunch of people owning these things" quickly discovered
>> that the issue you bring up is a problem, and they got together to
>> standardize it to eliminate the problem. When you send an emoji to someone
>> else, they don't necessarily get the exact same rendering of the emoji that
>> you sent, but if you sent a "🧕", they should get an emoji representing a
>> "woman with headscarf".
> 
> I was wondering about that because I'm not seeing "woman with headscarf".
> 
> JohnR said they should be the same for everyone but they aren't for me.
> 
> Do I need to belong to a club to see the same thing as other people when I receive "lady wearing long dress beating horse" or "man in top hat having gay sex with slave from 1980's reproduction of slave literature really cool in the southern US states now" ?

Well, I suppose that’s always a concern with pictographs, eh? The standard specifies a description, in a few words of English, of what each code point is supposed to represent. After that it’s up to the artist creating the glyph to interpret that description and create something in 64 pixels that evokes the description. There’s no way the standard can specify what the artist comes up with nor how individuals will interpret the work. So I said that the trumpet emoji (code point 0x1f3ba, see https://emojipedia.org/trumpet/ <https://emojipedia.org/trumpet/> for some examples of how different artists have interpreted it) isn’t going to display a Trump (who doesn’t yet have a Unicode code point).

[SNIP]

Regards,
John Ralls