Alt Codes for Symbols

Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization maintains technical specification for all emoji symbols. Fundamentally, you can type all emoji symbols similar to text characters. However, default keyboard does not have keys to support thousands of emoji and other symbols. Therefore, you need to use alt code shortcuts for inserting symbols or use other tools like Character Viewer in Mac and Character Map in Windows 10.

The display specifications of emoji characters are defined by Unicode Consortium. Individual operating systems and applications need to adopt the Unicode standard by using UTF-8 or similar character encoding. In addition to character encoding, font can also change the display of the emoji.

Poplar applications like Microsoft Word uses UTF-8 encoding, however display emoji in a greyscale without colors. However, social media websites like Facebook uses their own encoding and display colorful emoji.

Apple offers a dedicated emoji keyboard to insert emoji symbols in iPhone and iPad.

• When you are typing in a text box, tap on the globe icon on your keyboard.
• Choose “Emoji” as your keyboard.
• Tap on the emoji symbol you want to insert.