Skin-tone emojis sent as the base emoji with a color icon next to it

[ryoarmanda]

Currently, there is no support for sending actual colored emojis. If you send a colored emoji, it will be displayed as the base emoji, and then a color, and then a male/female gender icon (if the emoji has a gender). See the screenshot below:

I don't know if this is intended or not, but I think it's nice to add support for the colored emojis as a single emoji, rather than above.

[borisyankov]

Interesting. We should probably add this at some point.
Does the web version support that already?

[timabbott]

Web does not support this yet, though there's an open issue.

[borisyankov]

I suspect it might be an issue adding this, since the sprite sheet will need to contain a lot more images?

[timabbott]

I think the standard sprite sheets we're using on web have images for all the skin colors, but I'm not totally sure, so we'll need to look. Shouldn't be a big problem on mobile, at least, since we can just include all the images in the app distribution.

(BTW, another related feature we have on web that's supported in large part by the iamcal data set and we should eventually port to mobile is displaying emoji using the emoji set that the user selected in "display settings")

[borisyankov]

@timabbott This is a recent discussion, that you might have not seen:
https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/design/topic/emoji.20rendering

It seems we have the different skin color images, so it is a matter of supporting them.

[timabbott]

Great, glad that's confirmed. Read that discussion just now: sounds like someone dealt with opening an issue for switching to the 64x64 version of the sprite sheets. zulip/zulip#992 is the issue for this feature on web; one of our older open ones :)

[chrisbobbe]

As mentioned in zulip/zulip#11767 (comment) (pending some investigation on the server), it appears that Unicode emoji that use the ZWJ (e.g., man + skin tone) do work, but only after the first instance in a string of repeated emoji, like this:
. That issue seems like the best place for discussion about using Unicode emoji with the ZWJ.

If this issue is about adding support for these combined emoji through Zulip markdown (e.g., with syntax like :emoji_name::skin-tone-n:), as requested in zulip/zulip#992, then it probably makes sense to keep this issue open for any mobile work that would need to be done for that new markdown capability.

[gnprice]

If you send [an emoji with a skin tone], it will be displayed as the base emoji, and then a color, and then a male/female gender icon (if the emoji has a gender).

Yeah. This is exactly zulip/zulip#11767 .

Currently, there is no support for sending actual [emoji with skin tones].

Once zulip/zulip#11767 is fixed, you'll be able to send these by entering them on your phone's keyboard.

We'd also like to offer them in the autocomplete when you type : and start typing an emoji name (though that part matters a lot less on mobile than desktop/web, because on mobile your keyboard supports emoji), and to offer them as emoji reactions. Those make up zulip/zulip#992.