Affinity Publisher - problems with emojis

[Marc Kemmer]

What Application are you using? Publisher
Are you using the latest release version? yes, 2.10
Can you reproduce it? yes
Does it happen for a new document? yes

What is your operating system and version? macOS Ventura 13.4 (22F66)
Is hardware acceleration (in Preferences > Performance) ON or OFF ? (and have you tried the other setting?) it is ON and only if it's on for M1, this problem occurs!

my hardware is a MacBook Pro 13", M1 2020, 16 GB.

If the hardware acceleration is on, the emojis are displayed all the same (even if they are not). Please see the screenshot of the SAME document with hardware acceleration ON and with OFF and see the difference.

[Dan C]

Hi @Marc Kemmer,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

I can confirm that a similar issue has been raised here on the forums recently - 

As can be seen in this thread, the behaviour seems to differ from user to user, and there is no clear cause of this error currently.

For example, I have tested on an M1 (2020 MBP, 8GB, Ventura 13.4) in Publisher 2.1 here - and both with Metal Hardware Acceleration enabled & disabled, the  Emojis all appear correctly for me and are not shown as the same Emoji as in your screenshot.

As shown in the above thread, this issue is logged with our developers, so I will be sure to include the information you have provided above, in the hopes this helps our team to narrow down the exact cause of this between users.

Many thanks for all the information provided here & I hope this helps!

[Barry Southwood]

Emojis showed up on my MacBook Pro with Ventura 13.3.1 after installing Publisher 2. After the recent update to 2.1.0, they don't show up anymore. 

[Dan C]

Hi @Barry Southwood,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums & I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble!

As above this issue has been logged with our development team to be investigated and resolved ASAP - however can you please confirm for me, are you finding these Emojis all appear as the same Emoji character unexpectedly, or are these simply no longer displayed for you?

If no longer displayed, are you unable to find the font name in the font menu, can you select the font but the Glyph browser is empty, or are you able to add these from the Glyph browser but they do not appear on your canvas?

Many thanks in advance for any information you can provide

[Barry Southwood]

Hi Dan, sorry I didn't see this sooner!

The emojis come in as blank spaces. Oddly, they displayed yesterday (06.10.23), but are now missing again today! They were copied and pasted from Apple Messages, the fonts assigned to them in Publisher are whatever style I'm pasting them into. (first screenshot) The style didn't change at all. Pasting them without taking on the existing style still gives a blank space. I looked at older Publisher documents that displayed emojis correctly, but they're blank spaces now too.

Trying to enter them myself using the keyboard (2021 MacBook Pro 16 inch running Ventura 13.3.1), it still gives a blank space. The Glyph Browser doesn't show any emojis in any fonts. (second screenshot)

Hope that helps.

Screenshot 2023-06-11 at 7.40.08 PM.pdf Screenshot 2023-06-11 at 7.45.40 PM.pdf

[Barry Southwood]

Today (06.12.23), all the emojis are showing up as the smiley with sunglasses.

Screenshot 2023-06-12 at 9.38.15 PM.pdf

[Dan C]

No problem at all @Barry Southwood, many thanks for the information provided - this is certainly helpful and I will forward this through to our developers now.

I'm still not personally sure of the exact cause of this issue, especially with such erratic behaviour but our team do hope to have this resolved in a future update

[Barry Southwood]

Here's another interesting twist! When I preflighted a document that didn't have any emojis showing up, the Preflight showed them all, and said they were missing in the doc.

EmojisInPreflight.pdf

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Barry Southwood said:

and said they were missing in the doc.

That message indicates that the characters are not part of the font that you've chosen to use for that text, and should therefore show up in the text as missing (often a box character) or will be substituted from some other font.

[Barry Southwood]

Walt, as indicated by this thread, we've tried multiple fonts, and for a while, the exact same fonts DID show the emojis in the documents. If the Preflight function can recognize and display the emojis correctly that are supposed to be there, I thought maybe that would be an indicator of what's causing this issue.

[kenmcd]

On 6/11/2023 at 4:59 PM, Barry Southwood said:

They were copied and pasted from Apple Messages,

This could be part of the problem.

The Apple Color Emoji.ttc file actually contains two "Apple Color Emoji" fonts.
.AppleColorEmojiUI.ttf - which is a system font to display emojis in the UI.
AppleColorEmoji.ttf - which I assume is where APub gets the emojis to embed.

My guess is that the copied-and-pasted emojis are actually coming over as the system font - which cannot be embedded in a PDF.
So you can see them in the UI (and the pre-flight dialog), but cannot embed them.

If you insert the emojis directly (not copy-paste), does that work as expected?

 

[Barry Southwood]

That was one group. I've had Android messages that I pasted in, and the emojis didn't show up. Then other times ALL emojis showed up, no matter the source. And they still show up correctly in Preflight.

[kenmcd]

41 minutes ago, Barry Southwood said:

That was one group. I've had Android messages that I pasted in, and the emojis didn't show up. Then other times ALL emojis showed up, no matter the source. And they still show up correctly in Preflight.

Emoji fonts are all different.
And the ways they are constructed are often (usually) quite different.
And many times the character sets are quite different.
Emoji fonts are basically a cross-platform nightmare.

So copy-pasting emojis is a very hit-or-miss operation.
Depending on the source font(s) and target font or OS, it may or may not work.

The only way to analyze this is to see exactly what the source is (font, type of emoji font, Unicode codes, OS, etc.) - and then look at the same info on the target.

Back to my original question...
If you insert the emojis directly (not copy-paste), does that work as expected?

 

[Old Bruce]

13 minutes ago, kenmcd said:

Emoji fonts are basically a cross-platform nightmare.

Friends don't let friends use emojis. Unicode's worst mistake ever was including them, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".

[Alfred]

28 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Friends don't let friends use emojis. Unicode's worst mistake ever was including them, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".

[smiling-face-with-horns emoji]

[Barry Southwood]

Ken, even pasting from the Apple emojis doesn't work. There WAS a period of time, when ALL emojis, pasted or directly inserted, showed up correctly in Publisher, then a day later they didn't. Wait a couple of days and they worked.

I'm with Old Bruce! Use words, not emojis! Ha!

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Barry Southwood said:

I'm with Old Bruce! Use words, not emojis! Ha!

👍

[Brian_J]

5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Friends don't let friends use emojis. Unicode's worst mistake ever was including them, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".

i dont generally have an issue w emojis its the growing disregard for grammar that irks me idk im an old dude fwiw i try not to complain and accept the changing tides but thats a diff topic than emojis sorry dont mean to go off topic tl;dr lol

[kenmcd]

23 hours ago, Barry Southwood said:

Ken, even pasting from the Apple emojis doesn't work. There WAS a period of time, when ALL emojis, pasted or directly inserted, showed up correctly in Publisher, then a day later they didn't. Wait a couple of days and they worked.

This is quite strange, but not entirely unexpected.

Apple Color Emoji is a Color-SBIX font.
Affinity applications do not support Color-SBIX fonts.
So I am not sure what they have done to support inserting those emojis on macOS.
SBIX fonts use images so Affinity may just be grabbing one of the images when it is being inserted. Dunno.
But since I assume that is some sort of special method, it is not likely simply pasting an emoji from another application would work reliably.
And, Apple has been known to put non-standard code into some of their own fonts to tie the fonts into their ownership/permissions system.
That is a real possibility which could explain the on/off situation you have described.
Also, emojis are quite often a sequence of code-points, not one code-point.
In the Apple Color Emoji font it uses the non-standard morx table to process these sequences.
Affinity applications do not support the non-standard morx table.
So when you insert an emoji directly it may only be from a sub-set of what is available in another application - and pasting a sequence from that other application may result in tofu.

The only way I think you can reliably have emojis is to insert them directly (using the Affinity special handling).
If that is not working, then that is a bug beyond your control - that Affinity needs to address.

Cross-platform emoji cut-n-paste = minefield.
For the reasons I mentioned above.
If ya just gotta know...
See the table of different emoji fonts features and characteristics here:
https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/blob/master/notes/emoji-implementation.md#format-features-and-control-codepoint-visiblity-table 
And the emoji font shaping info here:
https://github.com/n8willis/opentype-shaping-documents/blob/master/opentype-shaping-emoji.md 
 

Your issues may be a combination of an APub issue - which Affinity can fix,
and general emoji font craziness - which is probably not fixable.

 

[kenmcd]

20 hours ago, Brian_J said:

i dont generally have an issue w emojis its the growing disregard for grammar that irks me idk im an old dude fwiw i try not to complain and accept the changing tides but thats a diff topic than emojis sorry dont mean to go off topic tl;dr lol

Ugh. I am with you 100% - that this is unacceptable.
And shows a complete lack of respect for the person they are asking to help.
And is just lazy.

Have seen posts exactly like your example here in this forum, and in GitHub issues posts.
I remember one particularly bad example on GitHub was the longest no-punctuation run-on abbreviations mess I have ever seen. Easily 4-5 times the length of your example.
Completely unintelligible.

When I see this kind of lazy nonsense, I just ignore it and move on.

[Barry Southwood]

Ken, thanks for that info, which is WAY above my pay grade! Especially, since I retired. Ha. I get the gist of it, having been a graphic artist for many moons! I just don't get how the emojis show up correctly in Preflight, yet are either blanks or the sunglasses guy most of the time now. Yet before, the correct emojis DID show up in the Publisher documents, for a brief time. Very strange!

[Barry Southwood]

The past couple of days, the emojis are all coming in, but as the scream guy emoji.

Screenshot 2023-07-05 at 8.55.30 PM.pdf

[Alex White]

On 7/1/2023 at 8:50 PM, Old Bruce said:

Friends don't let friends use emojis. Unicode's worst mistake ever was including them, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".

I quite like using them in order to have playing card suits available as font characters. 

I don't suppose there are any good font alternatives to emoji for that?

[kenmcd]

3 hours ago, Alex White said:

I quite like using them in order to have playing card suits available as font characters. 

I don't suppose there are any good font alternatives to emoji for that?

Here are a few... these are just a few free or came-with-the-OS fonts.
There are also commercial fonts which have playing cards.

Noto Sans Symbols 2
Symbola
DejaVu Sans
Quivira
Segoe UI Symbol (Windows)
Apple Symbols (macOS)