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Emoji encoding

Mutant Standard emoji are encoded in one of two ways:

  • Shortcode - Human-readable filenames that you would use in emoji pickers like on Mastodon and Discord. For instance, thumbs_up_paw_fk1 represents )
  • Codepoint - Unicode codepoints where a number (usually represented in hexadecimal) refers to a character that can include emoji. For instance, 1f389 is

Codepoints

Codepoints are how text (and emoji) are encoded in the Unicode Standard. Mutant Standard uses this encoding for codepoints when there are emoji that are in this standard.

Private Use Area (PUA) codepoints

Some emoji that are in Mutant Standard that are not in the Unicode Standard have been encoded in one of Unicode’s Private Use areas (PUAs).

A PUA is a chunk of numbers that Unicode has declared can be used by anyone without fear of it being taken for something else by them. So if you wanted to encode characters or emoji that Unicode aren’t going to put there themselves, that’s where it would be, and this is where some non-standard Mutant Standard emoji are.

You can easily identify Mutant Standard PUA codepoints by their number - they start from 1016xx.

Using PUA codepoints can be cool (for example, transmitting emoji between people in systems that can’t have Mutant Standard via other means), but it’s also experimental:

  • Operating systems can’t know what PUA encodings are, so unless the software you’re using can interpret and describe them to people who use screenreaders, they will be unreadable to them.
  • Viewing PUA encodings means the software or the operating system needs to be able to visually display the character in place, either through a font or something else.
  • There is no standard in the PUA, which means someone else could use the same codepoints that Mutant Standard uses for their own encodings. This is the inherent nature of the PUA - it’s for non-standard encodings, and it means you can’t really handle overlaps, you have to choose one character set or the other.

Further reading

To learn in more detail about Mutant Standard’s encoding system (including PUA), download the reference documents:

Mutant Standard reference documents