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alisone40123305
alisone40123305
Participant
July 17, 2018
Answered

How to use Emoji in InDesign

  • July 17, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 141706 views

Hi,

I'm typesetting a story which features emojis and have downloaded the emoji 2.0 keyboard. Does anyone know how to get the emojis into the Indesign document please? Or, if this isn't possible, another way to get them in there. Thanks.

 

***** Title renamed by Moderator "VS" *****

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Steve Werner

Use the Glyphs panel. Choose Type > Glyphs to open it. Choose the font that has the emojis in the menu at the bottom. Find the emoji you want and double-click to insert.

Recent glyphs are shown at the top to use them again. You can also use the menu to create sets of glyphs you want to use regularly.

3 replies

H
hughc46560181
Participating Frequently
April 23, 2021

Another way (which works better for my needs) is to download .png files of the emojis you want to use from https://emojipedia.org/ then place these as images into your InDesign document

    D
    defaultdn37ugxizxnm
    Participant
    February 3, 2021

    This thread wasn't clear for me, so wanted to pull it all together with the steps that worked for me:

    I selected Apple Color Emoji as the font (I'm not sure if it comes standard with all Macs).

    When I then opened Type > Glyphs, I selected Show: > Entire Font to see all the available Unicode emojis and select the one I wanted. You can also use the search box directly above the Show: dropdown to find the exact emoji you're looking for. The emoji I used also exported to a pdf. 

    Apologies if this is redundant to the other answers in the thread, but I didn't understand that I had to specifically select the Apple Color Emoji font before opening the Glyphs panel. 

     

    Thanks!

      AlexWilliamsDSGN
      AlexWilliamsDSGN
      Participant
      March 3, 2022

      Thank you this worked perfect for me

      Steve Werner
      Community Expert
      Steve WernerCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
      Community Expert
      July 17, 2018

      Use the Glyphs panel. Choose Type > Glyphs to open it. Choose the font that has the emojis in the menu at the bottom. Find the emoji you want and double-click to insert.

      Recent glyphs are shown at the top to use them again. You can also use the menu to create sets of glyphs you want to use regularly.

        troyandreasen
        troyandreasen
        Participant
        September 13, 2018

        I saw your answer about inserting emoji in InDesign by going through glyphs. That was great, and I got it to work. But now that I'm trying to export my document as a PDF, the emoji don't show... How do I get them to show on the pdf? Thanks!

          Jongware
          Community Expert
          JongwareCommunity Expert
          Community Expert
          September 14, 2018

          I’m using it on a Mac with the Apple Color Emoji font. After I posted the question, I noticed that the emojis did show if I opened the pdf in Adobe Acrobat, but they don’t show in Apple’s Preview app - which is really odd because it’s Apple’s own font. (Yet Adobe embedded it, so I’m not sure which end is causing the issue.) I guess that still leaves it up in the air, since I’m not sure how the final destination (Amazon) will be processing the pdf.


          troyandreasen  wrote

          ... I noticed that the emojis did show if I opened the pdf in Adobe Acrobat, but they don’t show in Apple’s Preview app - which is really odd because it’s Apple’s own font. (Yet Adobe embedded it, so I’m not sure which end is causing the issue.)

          The standard for colored fonts is fairly new, and the ability to use colored fonts are only a very recent addition to the general Adobe software. Since the PDF file format is frozen, colored fonts do not end up as such in a PDF either. If you inspect a PDF with Acrobat Pro you will find that this

          is not the usual selectable text at all (*) but just a series of vector images.

          So, that cannot be the reason why Apple Preview has a problem with them! They are just that: images. I was secretly and somewhat optimistically hoping that they'd turn out to be "color font characters" after all (and then the conclusion would be that it doesn't work because Apple Preview Is Outdated Crap) -- but that turns out to not be the case.

          A short answer: Apple Preview ought not have any problem with this.

          But it is by far not a surprise, however, that this doesn't work. Preview has far worse problems.

          (*) There may be invisible data underneath it, which can be copied. But that's cheating; the colored images themselves are not characters.

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