showtext messing up emoji rendering

[matiasandina]

I am trying to use emojis in a ggplot y axis for which I use a custom font (via showtext).
I have noticed that emojis don't render after showtext_auto(). Is there a way this could be supported?

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
#> 
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#> 
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#> 
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union
library(purrr)
#remotes::install_github("hadley/emo")
library(emo)

dat <- tibble(names = c("smile","school","office","blush","smirk","heart_eyes"),
              emoji = map_chr(names, emo::ji)) %>% 
  tibble::rowid_to_column("n")

dat %>% ggplot(aes(n, emoji)) + 
  geom_col(orientation="y") +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(size = 18))

library(showtext)
#> Loading required package: sysfonts
#> Loading required package: showtextdb
showtext_auto()
dat %>% ggplot(aes(n, emoji)) + 
  geom_col(orientation="y") +
  theme(axis.text.y = element_text(size = 18))

^{Created on 2021-12-01 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[emreit1991]

I am having the same issue as above! Is this something that is planning to be addressed? Thank you!

[salim-b]

I also can't make emojis work with showtext. I thought the symbol argument of sysfonts::font_add() would allow to specify a separate emoji font (like Noto Color Emoji), but that doesn't seem to work, i.e. emojis are still replaced by a □ placeholder... 😕

@yixuan Any hints what's going on with emojis in showtext?

[rsh52]

I'm also finding that showtext_auto() breaks emoji rendering, it would be great to resolve this @yixuan

[rsh52]

For those interested, following these examples and tips from June Choe and Cara Thompson were extremely helpful:

• https://yjunechoe.github.io/posts/2021-06-24-setting-up-and-debugging-custom-fonts/
• https://www.cararthompson.com/posts/2024-01-12-using-fonts-in-r-for-dataviz/2024-01-12_getting-fonts-to-work#check-the-font-you-want-to-use-is-installed

In my use case, I wanted to make a specific font (FontAwesome) available to users of a package I'm developing. First step is to use systemfonts::register_font() with the appropriate font TTF and check its availability with systemfonts::registry_fonts(). Once confirmed and the font was loaded, I no longer needed to use showtext to get my font to render, and it no longer impacted emoji rendering.