I don't have anything against that, in principle. It would just be more satisfying for me if the blue books were encoded in the font as U+1F4D8s, rather than U+F02Ds. Or, if the colors are done at a CSS level, as 📕 U+1F4D5 CLOSED BOOKs or the like. Same goes for the other icons in FA which *do *have an emoji counterpart (which would be, I suspect, the majority).
The reasons I'd prefer such an encoding are, to be honest, purely æsthetic; but they could also be argued on functional terms. Consider Instagram's fascinating results when applying word-vector models to emoji, for example ( https://engineering.instagram.com/emojineering-part-1-machine-learning-for-emoji-trendsmachine-learning-for-emoji-trends-7f5f9cb979ad ). One never knows just *when *someone will want to interchange, convert, or index characters; even emoji symbols can find valid, unexpected applications. Suppose a researcher in the future wants to investigate early usage of academic emoji in the 21st century. Or suppose something as simple as trying to find out which emoji are used most frequently in a field, country, or time period. Having the icon encoded as U+1F4D5 rather than U+F02D would help this sort of interoperability, while causing no problems for anyone (it's, after all, just a matter of choosing which numbers you give to which icons; calling it #128213 is as easy as calling it #61485). 2017-07-24 1:45 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org>: > Leonardo Boiko wrote: > > To my boundless, heartbreaking disappointment, these emojis are not >> U+1F4D8 BLUE BOOKs 📘 from a custom @css font, but rather private-use >> U+F02Ds, which index a book glyph in some icon pack called Font >> Awesome <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_Awesome>. At least they're >> inserted via CSS :before-selectors, which means they'll be >> automatically treated as decorations and seamlessly excluded from >> copy-paste operations. >> > > We use Font Awesome for my project at work, for symbols embedded in text > which have no reason and no need to be interchanged, converted to other > character sets, or indexed in search engines. > > Font Awesome also includes some symbols that, we think, won't ever be > Unicode emoji, such as the Android, Apple, Bluetooth, and Windows logos. > > -- > Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org > >