Have any of you used emojis in text/chat messages your characters send each other? Does SOL (or epubs) support that?
As a reader, what would think of that?
I had one character send an emoji as a reply in A Healing Love, and Paul described the emoji (one of those smiley faces with hearts for eyes) - would it have been better to use the actual emoji?
would it have been better to use the actual emoji?
How would that work in a .txt format download?
AJ
How would that work in a .txt format download?
It's just a character like every other. The text can contain any UTF-8 characters. It's up to the reading device to display it.
Does SOL (or epubs) support that?
The site's system is all UTF-8. So yes. However, it depends on the reader's system if it has that emoji in its character set.
There are almost always new emojis, and not every system has the glyph for it.
So, on balance, probably best to avoid them? That's my instinct, but they are such a part of the way we communicate now, I wondered if it was time to re-evaluate.
I wonder if any commercial authors have used them...
Once upon a time, they'd use them to capture messaging apps. But that period didn't last long.
Yes, some commercial authors have used them. It's not that uncommon in youth / YA fiction, and happens in adult fiction. Quick googling shows that one such book ('The Rabbit Hutch', by Tess Gunty) won the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction.
There has been at least one court case using emojis. Probably more, by now.
I used them for simulated messages in Teaming With The Shrew, in chapter 9. https://storiesonline.net/n/48299/teaming-with-the-shrew/9
It didn't come out as well as in the epub, but the emojis are all there.
Examples of text emojis, from way back when all you could type online were standard text characters, are ":)" smiling, ";)" winking or :( a frown. But whenever someone sends me a graphic emoji, I often can't tell what the heck it's supposed to be (i.e. is that a cucumber or a yellow club?).
I often need to ask my teenage descendants to interpret for me.
I understand that the same emoji may have multiple meanings, depending on context. For example, the emoji 🍆 that unicode labels "eggplant" is used to mean penis in most non-culinary contexts. (This is the first time that I have ever used that one.)