Green astronaut (was: RE: Please provide green skin-color for emojis)

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Fri Jul 30 18:31:22 CDT 2021


The "green astronaut" question is answered in UTS #51, "Unicode Emoji."

An astronaut emoji is created with a ZWJ sequence:

U+1F9D1 ADULT (or U+1F468 MAN or U+1F469 WOMAN)
U+200D  ZERO WIDTH JOINER
U+1F680 ROCKET

This is described in Section 2.3.1, "Gender-Neutral Emoji," although the section heading hardly makes that clear.

Coloring a base emoji — let's say green — is accomplished with another ZWJ sequence:

U+1F44D THUMBS UP SIGN
U+200D  ZERO WIDTH JOINER
U+1F7E9 LARGE GREEN SQUARE

This is described in Section 2.9, "Color."

Then there is a Section 2.11, "Order of Emoji ZWJ Sequences," which defines the canonical order as follows:

1  Base (Section 1.4.1 Emoji Characters)
2  Emoji modifier or emoji presentation selector (Section 2.4 Diversity)
3  Hair component (Section 2.8 Hair Component)
4  Color (Section 2.9, Color)
5  Gender sign or object (Section 2.3.1, Gender-Neutral Emoji)
6  Direction indicator (Section 2.10, Emoji Glyph Facing Direction)

Remember that the astronaut sequence goes under the category "gender sign or object."

So the sequence is base (1), then ZWJ sequence for color (4), then ZWJ sequence for "astronaut" (5):

U+1F9D1 ADULT (or U+1F468 MAN or U+1F469 WOMAN)
U+200D  ZERO WIDTH JOINER
U+1F7E9 LARGE GREEN SQUARE
U+200D  ZERO WIDTH JOINER
U+1F680 ROCKET

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org





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