Prevent character being drawn as emoji

Question

I want to draw a single unicode character to a canvas, using drawText().

canvas.drawText("\u270c\ufe0e", x, y, paint);

On a test device running Android 7, it displays correctly:

But in my emulator, "running" Android 6, and on a real device running Android 6, it gets drawn as Emoji, regardless of the \ufe0e:

This is of course not what I want, since I want to have it drawn black, not pink! Is there any way to "switch off" Emojis when drawing text?

Answer 1

You can try using the EmojiCompat library, described here and here. Add it to your dependencies;

dependencies {
    ...
    implementation "com.android.support:support-emoji:27.1.1"
    implementation "com.android.support:support-emoji-bundled:27.1.1"
    ...
}

Initialize the library;

EmojiCompat.init(new BundledEmojiCompatConfig(this).setReplaceAll(true));

And then replace TextView with EmojiTextView. Here's an example you can use to test:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    tools:ignore="HardcodedText">

    <!-- replace -->
    <TextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:textSize="16sp"
        android:text="TextView - default: \u270c, text: \u270c\ufe0e, emoji: \u270c\ufe0f"/>

    <!-- with -->
    <android.support.text.emoji.widget.EmojiTextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:textSize="16sp"
        android:text="EmojiTextView - default: \u270c, text: \u270c\ufe0e, emoji: \u270c\ufe0f"/>
</LinearLayout>

If it doesn't work how you would like, remove .setReplaceAll(true) from the initialization line, try again, and see if that works.

EDIT:

If you want to draw the emoji text manually e.g. to a canvas, you can do it with EmojiCompat.process(...) and android.text.StaticLayout. I haven't tried it so there might be errors, but it should work.

// assuming x, y, and paint are defined
CharSequence emoji = EmojiCompat.get().process("\u270c\ufe0e");
StaticLayout layout = new StaticLayout(emoji, paint, 
    canvas.getWidth(), Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_NORMAL, 1.0f, 0.0f, false);
canvas.translate(x, y);
layout.draw(canvas);
canvas.translate(-x, -y);