Substack Can Deal With Emoji 💁

and other Unicode characters too ✓

Substack newsletters contain images, audio, video … and, of course, text.

Substack – on the web and via email – can display a wide variety of Unicode characters. (I've come across some Unicode characters that don't display properly in Substack web posts or emails, at least in the browsers I've been using. I'll investigate this phenomenon further and do a follow-up post if the problem appears significant.)

Support for a significant portion of Unicode is necessary to allow posts in various languages. (If you're interested in newsletters written in several languages, take a look at stacksear.ch Around the World.)

But alphabets are not the only kinds of characters that newsletters can display. Substack can handle numbers (integers and fractions), punctuation, superscripts, and subscripts. And symbols such as emoji. 🙂

I've noticed emoji here and there in Substack newsletters. (Most notably, the Unicode emoji subcommittee chair has a Substack.) I suppose emoji aren't appropriate to some newsletters that are serious in subject or tone. But I imagine that some writers don't use emoji because they are acclimated to publications that frowned upon or just didn't use emoji.

On Substack, imho, you should be free to express yourself and use all the tools at your disposal to communicate with your audience. And that could include emoji in the right newsletter and appropriate situation (e.g., to emphasize a point or break up a block of text). 🤔

You can use emoji in the title or subtitle of a post. You can use them in the caption to an image. You can even use emoji in a button! But be careful – as I’ll now demonstrate, some emoji may not work well with your button color:

If you don't already use an emoji-enabled keyboard, you can copy and paste emoji from Emojipedia or a Unicode chart.

BabelPad is useful free Windows software for finding and copying Unicode (including emoji). Unicode Pad is a similar free Android app. I haven't worked with Unicode on other operating systems – but there are ways of finding and entering Unicode on Mac, iOS, and Linux.

If this post has gotten you intrigued about emoji and Unicode, here are deep dives into these topics in other Substack newsletters:

• John Watson's Death by Tech Newsletter, The Tale of the Emoji Mafia

• Counting Stuff, Character Encodings — The Pain That Won’t Go Away, Part 2/3: Unicode

I hope you’ll return soon for my next post, about JavaScript (or workarounds to the lack thereof) in links on Substack.

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Do you use emoji or atypical Unicode characters in your newsletters?

Have you noticed any especially clever uses of emoji or other Unicode?