Unicode symbol as text or emoji

John Gruber asked on Twitter how to force a unicode symbol to render as text insted of emoji. Jason Weather replied that appending U+FE0E forces the symbol to render as text.

I had recently researched a bit on the inner-working of the new emoji skin tone modifiers¹ in Unicode 7.0.² The basics: if a emoji skin tone modifier immediately follows certain characters they should be rendered as a single glyph.

See Unicode technical report #51 for more info.

Standardized variants

The character mentioned by Jason on Twitter is a variation selector under the standardized variants sequence in Unicode 7.0, U+FE0E is named VARIATION SELECTOR-15.

Variation selectors:

“Combining characters; in conjunction with the preceding character these indicate a predetermined choice of variant glyph”
— Unicode Consortium U+FE00 code chart

The basic functionality of variation selectors are comparable to the emoji skin tone modifiers in that they choose a certain variation of the preceding character.

Currently only VS-1, VS15 and VS16 have been defined and implemented, check out a list of VS-1 variant glyphs.

Unfortunately it’s a little hard to demonstrate these things since OS and browser support varies so much.

Character	Image	Emoji	Normal	Text
U+2764		❤️	❤	❤︎
U+21A9		↩️	↩	↩︎
U+25B6		▶️	▶	▶︎

Result on OS X 10.10.3: Chrome 42 and Safari 8.0.5 - the result on iOS with MobileSafari was identical to Safari. ³

I’ve used the Unicode converter on rishida.net quite a lot to convert to/from different Unicode representations. Taking another look at the solution by Jason and running it through the converter we see that the ↩ vs ↩︎ corresponds to: U+21A9 vs U+21A9U+FE0E - notice the U+FE0E at the end of the converted string.