Update: TextMesh Pro is now free, and it will be integrated to Unity. So if you want to use Emojis in your Unity project, I would suggest that you use it instead of Unity-UI-emoji.

Unity-UI-emoji

Show emoji images in Unity UI text

WebGL demo

Introduction

Since Unity doesn't have build-in emoji support in it, I wanted to test out different approaches for showing emoji in Unity projects.

This one shows emoji via UI Text.

How to use

Download and import the Unitypackage unity_emoji_v200.unitypackage to your project. Open showoff scene and press play to see the emojis in action.

Basically you have to have a RawImage with emoji atlas set in the scene (in this case rawImageToClone in ShowOffEmoji.cs) to be used for emoji replacement. After that you can call

StartCoroutine(this.SetUITextThatHasEmoji(uiText, "⚽ ➕ ❤ = I love football"));

to set your uiText.

How does it work under the hood

1. step, rebuild the input string and replace any emoji (or special char) with (em quad)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(typography)] char, e.g. string "my ™ is best" -> "my   is best"
2. step, set UI Text to rebuild text (so emojis are drawn as blank)
3. step, generate new RawImage for each replaced emoji, position those correctly and set correct atlas UVs

Tips

• If you don't need/want e.g Copyright symbol (a9.png) to be drawn as emoji then you can just remove the file (a9.png) and rebuild the atlas
• You can add/replace PNGs if you need new emojis or custom symbols (rebuild atlas after that)

Limitations

• You have to get emoji graphics from somewhere. In this case I used those provided by Twitter via their Twemoji project. Graphics licensed under CC-BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• You have to create atlas from those emoji textures (EmojiAtlasBaker.cs does that)
• Every emoji shown requires new RawImage element
• You have to manually adjust RawImage settings (pivot etc.) to make them match your font
• Only supports one pixel size (albeit transform scaling can be used, but in that case pixel accuracy is lost)
• ~~Not all emojis are supported texture wise since current release of Twitter's Twemoji project is "only" Unicode 7.0 complete.~~ Twemoji is Unicode 8.0 complete
• Font needs to have (em quad)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(typography)] char (or something similar, that draws 1:1 blank)

Ugly stuff

All emojis that fit into single C# char (e.g. chars like ⚽ ➕ ❤) can be written directly to code but longer ones have to entered as escape sequences. Certain emojis require 4 chars (like US Flag, U+1F1FA U+1F1F8) since it build from 2 emojis (letters U U+1F1FA and S U+1F1F8).

Licences

This document, code files and scene file are licenced under Public domain. See PUBLICDOMAIN file.

Emoji textures (in Assets/Textures/Emojis folder) and Emoji atlas are licensed under CC-BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. All emoji textures are from Twitter's Twemoji project.

Roboto font (in [Assets/Fonts/Roboto-Regular.ttf]) is licensed under Apache License, version 2.0 [http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html]. It is from Google Fonts.