Is there any way to plot emojis in matplotlib?

Question

Does anybody know how to plot emojis in matplotlib while using windows? I've been struggling to find a solution as most out there seem to be specific for macOS.

Below is my current graph showing emojis plotted in a vector space, but as usual most do not show up.

Is there perhaps any fonts already installed with matplotlib that provide emoji support or will I need to install some backend solutions?

Code:

def display_pca_scatterplot(model, words=None, sample=0):
    if words == None:
        if sample > 0:
            words = np.random.choice(list(model.vocab.keys()), sample)
        else:
            words = [ word for word in model.vocab ]

    prop = FontProperties(fname='/usr/share/fonts/truetype/noto/Apple Color Emoji.ttc')

    word_vectors = np.array([model[w] for w in words])

    twodim = PCA().fit_transform(word_vectors)[:,:2]

    sb.set_style("darkgrid")
    plt.figure(figsize=(10,10))
    plt.scatter(twodim[:,0], twodim[:,1]) #, edgecolors='w', color='w')
    for word, (x,y) in zip(words, twodim):
        plt.text(x+0.0, y+0.0, word, fontsize=20) #fontproperties=prop)

Answer 1

I have created a small package imojify to deal with this issue

from imojify import imojify
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt 
from matplotlib.offsetbox import OffsetImage,AnnotationBbox

def offset_image(cords, emoji, ax):
    img = plt.imread(imojify.get_img_path(emoji))
    im = OffsetImage(img, zoom=0.08)
    im.image.axes = ax
    ab = AnnotationBbox(im, (cords[0], cords[1]),  frameon=False, pad=0)
    ax.add_artist(ab)


emjis = ['😂', '🤣', '😔', '😏','😍', '🥰', '😘']
values =[30, 50, 15, 29, 15, 50, 12]

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12,8))
ax.bar(range(len(emjis)), values, width=0.5,align="center")
ax.set_xticks(range(len(emjis)))
ax.set_xticklabels([])
ax.tick_params(axis='x', which='major', pad=26)
ax.set_ylim((0, ax.get_ylim()[1]+10))

for i, e in enumerate(emjis):
    offset_image([i,values[i]+5], e, ax)

the package contains images for all emojis, imojify.get_img_path(emoji) simply returns the path of the emoji image then you can use OffsetImage to add these images as labels