Hi, I'm using InDesign to create a memory book. Many people get one page each to fill with content. As past projects have shown, people are really keen about using Emojis, which I'd like to support. But I just can't get Emojis into InDesign via Data Merge, only when I copy&paste them manually. My workflow so far: In InDesign, I create a layout with sample texts, including Emojis. I create a character style for Emojis, using the EmojiOne font. In my paragraph style, I define a GREP Style to detect Emojis in any text and apply the character style created in the above step. This works. But as for the data merge part: I provide a sample page to help people get an idea how to fill it and what it will look like. I provide a Google form. People fill it with text and upload images. Google spreadsheet magic: I'm using a few formulas to prepare the texts for InDesign, and a script to determine the file names of the uploaded images. I download the resulting spreadsheet (tried several formats here). I use LibreOffice to convert the downloaded spreadsheet into .csv with UTF16-encoding. In InDesign, I import the .csv using the Data Merge panel. But the problem is: No matter how I format it and how I convert it, I won't get Emojis into the InDesign document. Only one of the two cases happens: Emojis (as well as other non-English characters) turn into cryptic symbols (when interpreting as ASCII - that's the expected behavior). Special characters survive, but Emojis are just stripped out of the text (when interpreting as Unicode, and formatting the source as UTF-16). But if I open the UTF16-formatted .csv with a text editor or with LibreOffice, select the text including the Emojis, copy it and paste it into my InDesign document, it works. Does anyone know a solution? What am I overlooking? Is there any other character encoding than UTF16 that InDesign supports?
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