Strokes for emoji?

[Ted Morin]

Hi all,

I'm trying to define some strokes for emoji. I realized that there has never been a great entry system for emoji, mainly because they are very visual and are therefore hard to search for and enter. On mobile platforms, you usually have to select a separate page of the keyboard, school through emoji, and then select them to enter into your text input. On a regular PC, the same problem occurs, where you usually have to use a virtual keyboard to input them. Steno actually solves this issue, because you can type what you need without needing to deal with virtual keyboards!

I have emoji defined as e/moej.

I'm trying to define some strokes for these characters. I've been trying to decide how to enter them. Maybe you can help with a suggestion -- here's what I've figured. You can type the name of what you want, say, "cat", and then a stroke to convert the phrase into emoji. Often there are variations on emoji, so then you could branch out from there. Please give feedback :)

Here's a list to get started:

- 😺 cat moej
- 😸 cat moej happy
- 😻 cat moej love
- 😽 cat moej kiss
- 😼 cat moej mean
- 🙀 cat moej doubt
- 😿 cat moej sad
- 😹 cat moej laugh
- 😾 cat moej frown
What is also cool is that, if you define these in this way, StenoTray will show you all your entries after you type cat moej. That helps with memorizing all your entries.
What do you think of entering emoji this way? What do you think about emoji at all?

[Chris Mostek]

I think the biggest problem you will run into is support for unicode characters in whichever program you're putting the text into. 

If you're running windows 8.1 you can just add the appropriate keystroke to your dictionary to create  1f63a then hit ALT+X

It sortof works in windows 7 but the cat emoji for example (on the machine I tested) comes up as just a box. 

You might want to have a stroke just for the ALT+X shortcut, then you can create other keystrokes that will give you the hex unicode value. 

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[Ted Morin]

Unless the font you are using has emoji support, they won't really appear. It's useful for Segoe UI or typing into Firefox, though. Also works with Google Hangouts. Right now I'm struggling because when I input the cat emojis into the dictionary, plover thinks that they share the same beginning byte and doesn't send the second emoji correctly. I think my dream of chaining emojis won't work, but using them for individual strokes should be OK.

[Ted Morin]

Here's what I added to my dictionary for now:

"KAT/PHOEPBLG": ":3",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/SPHAOEUL": "\ud83d\ude3a",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/HAEP": "\ud83d\ude38",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/HRAF": "\ud83d\ude39",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/HROF": "\ud83d\ude3b",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/KEUS": "\ud83d\ude3d",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/PHAOEPB": "\ud83d\ude3c",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/PHOEPBLG": "\ud83d\ude3b",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/SAD": "\ud83d\ude3f",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/TKOUT": "\ud83d\ude40",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/TPROURPB": "\ud83d\ude3e",

[Hesky Fisher]

Do you think you could elaborate on the problem of multiple unicode characters in sequence (chaining emoji)?

[Ted Morin]

Hesky,

The problem stems from the fact that the emoji start with the same bytes.

To illustrate the problem, try:

"KAT/PHOEPBLG": "\ud83d\ude3a",
"KAT/PHOEPBLG/HAEP": "\ud83d\ude38",

When Plover uses "commonprefix" it returns "\ud83d". len("\ud83d") = 1, so Plover thinks that it only needs to backspace once then output "\ude38", which is incorrect.

[Steven Bhardwaj]

Speaking of sequences of unicode characters...

Has anyone been thinking about using plover for signwriting?  ;)

I heard signwriting is rather low-adoption still, but it does look pretty awesome visually!

Image source: Wikipedia page (in incubation) written in ASL signwriting