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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering why you'd use this when you could just use an emoji, emoji look different based on the device or browser manufacturers. If your design requires a consistent look then this can be used to create an SVG that looks the same regardless of device or browser.

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As far as I can see, that's not what this does. The SVG this creates simply includes the emoji codepoint as a text element with a large font size. So what the user sees will still be entirely dependent on their local font.

If you want a consistent look across devices and browsers, you need an actual SVG graphic, not an SVG that renders a glyph from your default emoji font.

Ah OK. That greatly reduces my need for this service then.

Yep! Same here. I'm using emojis as icons on my website (https://remotehunt.com) and I don't like that my icons look different on different platforms.

But I haven't found an icon lib that I like as much as emojis.

What's the idea behind this tool then? Name implies it's for using emojis as icons, but I can do that anyways without the <svg>?

it's for using emojis as favicons – these little icons in browser tab headings (where HN has "Y" in an orange square)

For that, simply use https://twemoji.twitter.com/ or a similar service that lets you download SVG emojis. Then you implement it as a regular favicon.

Nope, it doesn't have a consistent look, because in the end it's still the browser engine rendering the SVG, and asking the OS for the glyph for the particular emoji.

In Windows 7 I get black & white emojis, and the website's favicon is a different shape to the one on Windows 10.

That’s not what this does. This is just a simple generator for <svg><text>[emoji]</text></svg>, so that you can get emoji in a format allowed for favicons.

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