What does this emoji mean?

[Anonymous]

Sometimes I get emojis like this in youtube comments and I don't know what it means.

[es20490446e]

It's called "tofu", and it means that the font the browser is using doesn't have a glyph for that character.

Most of the time this is due to a missing emoji in the font. Many fonts don't have a glyph for emojis.

This is something I had to deal with when making my own OS, called Zenned. On most operating systems emojis are missing. I had to make the system show emojis from Twitter when the font didn't provide them.

Hackerish code: https://gitlab.com/es20490446e/emoji.conf/-/blob/master/assets/template.conf?ref_type=heads

[es20490446e]

I think it looks awesome:

https://imgur.com/qp1TiEI

[Asker]

I have been using one called smile.

https://mijorus.it/projects/smile/

[es20490446e]

I have just tested it.

They look pretty similar, but on my system "smile" doesn't scale the UX, so it looks rather small.

Also I find "plasma-emojier", the one in my screen-shot, a bit simpler. Although it only works on KDE Plasma, so it makes sense using "smile" anywhere else.

[Shiprex]

It's characters your browser or app doesn't have the right font for.

[Hardon-Collider]

It's a simple question. That emoji is just a sign, a label. It's not the thing itself. It's a symbol for something real. For example, the emoji for laughing (😂) is a symbol for the real thing: laughing. When you see that emoji, you should try to 'feel into it,' to imagine the real gesture and feeling it represents. The real meaning isn't in the squiggle; it's in the thing the squiggle is pointing to.