This morning while recovering from a cold I got a bit lost in the innerwebs trying to find the answer to the Topic Title. If I could tag the topic as ‘Apple minutiae’ I would!
I had been texting with family and noticed that almost all the animals face left, and people and cars and so on also.
Eventually I found myself at Unicode Technical Standard 51
paragraph 2.10, Change Direction of Emoji Glyphs which seems to be authoritative and indicates that
Emoji with glyphs that face to the right or left may face either direction, according to vendor practice.
So that made me wonder why Apple (so much terminology in the page is way over my head, presumably Apple is a ‘vendor’) decided to have most facing left, if it’s an industry standard, if there’s a keyboard or tap shortcut to flip direction (as there is with skin color).
I also started to wonder if I could type the unicode somehow to flip the direction but couldn’t figure it out.
I also wondered if I could type the name of the Emoji and have it appear so added a shortened version of an emoji name in Text Replacement on macOS 15.0.1 and iphone 18.1 and it works! as does LaunchBar with full name or its Snippets feature. (I don’t use Predictive Text as I tend to tap the wrong thing and most of the time imhe it hasn’t been helpful).
So back to the Topic name, just out of curiosity and fellowship of minutiae, it would be interesting to know why emojis were left-facing, and if it’s an Apple thing, etc., if anyone here knows. Nothing big or urgent, just curious.
I think I read emojis started in Japan, and their traditional writing goes in vertical, right to left, so maybe left is ‘forward’ so to speak… or maybe not! ;-)
I noted the snail emoji goes to the right and that reminded me of the old Apple ad with an Intel Chip on the back of a snail, so I thought maybe it was a reference to the ad, but search results for images of the ad show the snail going left.
Along the way I enjoyed learning about and look forward to a future change in this direction: Ways of enlarging emoji in Messages
and want to thank Simon for this very useful tip in that Topic:
Dave, I don’t have an answer, but I do have to tell you that I smiled all the way through this. The investigating, gathering of evidence, and theorizing are right out of a BBC police procedural. No, actually, more an episode of Seinfeld. This is why I come to TidBITS.
It may be entirely apocryphal, but I recall hearing a story years ago when PBS was designing their now-iconic “human head” logo. They decided it should be in profile, but the debate was which direction it should face. According to the story, the decision came down to something like “so many people think PBS is left-leaning politically, let’s not feed that perception.” And so the PBS person faces right.
I wholeheartedly agree with @nextstep: It’s these threads that truly make TidBITS Talk very special.
Alas, I can’t either your question, either, but I did look up the direction in which the Classic Mac OS logo (which now graces the Finder app icon) from the mid-’90s was facing. And lo and behold: it’s also facing left!
Thanks for the kind remarks, I posted and had a bit of fear of being skewered for triviality. In the early days at least there were a fair bit of interesting things like this in the Apple universe, easter eggs and inside stories that gave me the impression actual humans with senses of humor were producing Apple products. Sometimes a dip into triviality and seeking the inside stories can be a useful break from ‘real life’!
I decided to ask a generative AI, Perplexity, this thread’s question. While you can read what it came up with here, a very interesting part of the output is it shows that within a day of this thread being posted on TidBITS, the thread became part of an AI’s knowledge base. The first source cited in Perplexity’s answer is this very thread.
So it seems pretty clear that TidBITS Talk is regularly searched and scraped by generative AI and LLM engines, Users beware!
Thanks for posting this David. This is the sort of philosophical question I often ask my wife, which results in a lot of eye-rolling on her part. Helping keep TidBITS weird, one post at a time.
I was just thinking about my Topic on Text Replacement and remembered I wanted to ask in this Topic if anyone knows if there is a keyboard combo to switch direction of Emoji, since it appears to be possible for ‘Vendors’ to implement different directions.
Somehow I have the notion that even if possible is not high on Apple’s priority list…
As far as I know, Unicode does not specify any particular images for emoji. So if an OS vendor wants to make them face the other direction (or maybe flip images based on the current text direction), I don’t think it would violate any standards.
Of course, all this requires OS-level support and given the virtually infinite number of ways emoji can be combined, it would be unreasonable to expect everything to be supported.
Unicode is insanely complex and is constantly changing. We shouldn’t be surprised that every implementation is broken, and that they are all differently broken.
That said, Unicode is heaven-sent compared to the way the world’s languages were handled prior to its release. If they would just stop promulgating multiple weird flexible spaces that you can’t distinguish from normal spaces. . . .
And on the subject of emoji and complexity take a gander at this:
