Hey everyone,
I’m working on a web app with an emoji picker. Right now, when users pick an emoji, it shows up in the textarea using the default emoji style from their operating system. This means Windows users see Windows-style emojis, and Linux users see Linux-style emojis.
What I’m trying to do is make all emojis show up as Twitter-style emojis, no matter what OS the user has. Is there a way to override the system default and force Twitter emojis to display in the textarea?
I’ve looked into a few options but haven’t found a solid solution yet. Has anyone tackled this before? Any tips or code examples would be super helpful!
Thanks in advance for any advice you can share!
Having worked on a similar project, I can suggest an alternative approach. Instead of using a JavaScript library, we implemented a custom emoji font. We created a web font that included Twitter-style emoji designs and applied it to our textarea.
This method has a few advantages. It’s lightweight, as you’re not loading an entire JS library. It also maintains the text-based nature of the emoji, which is better for accessibility and copy/paste functionality.
The downside is that creating a custom emoji font is time-consuming. You’d need to either design your own emoji or license existing designs. Also, you’ll need to update the font periodically as new emoji are added to the Unicode standard.
If you’re interested in this approach, look into tools like Fontforge or Glyphs for font creation. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but it gives you full control over the emoji appearance.
yo, have u tried using CSS? u can use the @font-face rule to load a custom emoji font that looks like Twitter’s. then just apply that font to ur textarea. it’s pretty straightforward and works across different OS’s. might be easier than messing with JS libraries or making ur own font from scratch
I’ve actually dealt with this exact issue in a project recently. The key is to use a JavaScript library that replaces native emoji with custom image-based versions. We ended up going with Twemoji, Twitter’s open-source emoji library.
Here’s the basic approach we took:
Include the Twemoji library in your project; after the user selects an emoji, intercept it before it’s added to the textarea; use Twemoji to convert the Unicode emoji to an image URL; and insert the image into your textarea instead of the Unicode character.
It took some tweaking to get it working smoothly, especially with cursor positioning and copy/paste functionality. But once set up, it gives a consistent look across all platforms. One caveat: make sure you have the rights to use Twitter’s emoji designs in your project. While Twemoji is open-source, there might be licensing considerations depending on your use case.