How to use Emoji in InDesign

[alisone40123305]

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" *****

[Steve Werner · Accepted solution]

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.

[alisone40123305]

Brilliant! Thanks so much.

[troyandreasen]

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!

[Steve Werner]

What font are you using that has the emoji? Perhaps its a font that doesn't allow font embedding in a PDF?

[troyandreasen]

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.

[BobLevine]

Apple Preview is a horrible choice for viewing PDFs. Always has been and I suspect at this point, it always will be.

[Jongware]

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.

[steveh88415317]

Apple use their own pdf viewer, which often doesn't display items correctly but which will display in adobe acrobat or reader.

[Laubender]

troyandreasen  wrote

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.

Hi Troy,

to show the Apple Color Emoji font renditions with Apple's Preview app you could try the following:

Export to PDF with:

1. Compatibility: Acrobat 4 (PDF 1.3 )

2. Convert to target profile

3. Target: sRGB

4. Enable Simulate Overprint

FWIW: Don't do anything in the Ink Manager.

Regards,

Uwe

[clangschultz]

I'm having the same issue where Apple Color Emojis font doesn't embed properly into PDFs. It actually looks fine on my computer, because I have the font installed... but when I send to our printer, they just see black silouettes in the same of the emoji. Every other font is embedded just fine. Maybe this font can't be embedded by InDesign?

[default2qjooybou09z]

I'm also having this issue. The emoji has been replaced by a random image. Help! Has anyone got a solution? Thanks

[defaultdn37ugxizxnm]

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]

Thank you this worked perfect for me

[hughc46560181]

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