MacMost Now 777: Emoji Characters For iOS and Mac

You can type Emoji characters on your iPhone, iPad or Mac and add them to your text messages, email messages or documents. Emoji characters are color characters with small images like smiling faces, map symbols, hearts, and so on. On the iPhone and iPad you need to enable the Emoji keyboard to easily type these. On the Mac, you need to turn on your character viewer.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's talk about using Emoji characters on the iPad, iPhone, and on the Mac.
So here you can see I'm composing a text message and I put in it a character that is actually not a letter but a picture of a face. It's a full color graphic image. You may get a lot of messages like this but you may not know how to put them in your own messages and in fact not only can you put them in messages but you can put them in emails, you can put them in your documents, you can type them just as you would type a regular character. It's just that you have to know how to do it.
So on the iPhone start by going to Settings. Under Settings go to General and then from there scroll down to Keyboard. Here you've got options for Keyboards there. This allows you to add multiple keyboards. Now most people just have the one keyboard. In this case English. But you can tap on Add a New Keyboard. Now say you occasionally type in another language like Chinese or Japanese or Greek or any of these. You can add it as a secondary, or third or fourth keyboard to what you've got.
You can also add one call Emoji. So let's go and do that. So I have two keyboards now. When I return to my text message app I can see that I've got at the bottom of my keyboard right there I've got the spacebar, the dictation microphone, and here I've got this little globe. That actually lets me switch keyboards. Most keyboards are international style keyboards so the globe kind of makes sense. But not so much for Emoji. 
Now when I tap that I get all these cool special characters. I can just tap one like it is a character on a keyboard to type it. You can see the dots at the top so I can actually swipe and scroll through them. Not only can I scroll through all of these here but I'm on the "faces" keyboard. You can see down here at the bottom where it has the little face. I can switch that to say Recently Used ones which will give you the ones you have most recently used but also you can tap here and you can see a whole different set of animals and plants and flowers and moons and things. Do these other symbols here. Transportation and maps style symbols and some symbols that are related to numbers and arrows and all sorts of things. 
So you can see there are tons of different symbols and you can scroll through all these and any one that you want you can add just by typing it. To switch back to your regular keyboard tap the globe again and it rotates through the keyboards. In this case my other keyboard is English US so it just goes back to that. So I can easily go back and forth between them like that.
Now on the iPad you can go the same thing. So you go to Settings and General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add a New Keyboard and then you find Emoji and add that. Then when you are done with that you can jump to your messages app and then you've got that little keyboard globe button there and you can swipe through all the different Emoji characters here and add anyone that you want. 
You are not restricted to using this in just text messages. You can use this in emails. You can even use it here in Pages. So anything that has a keyboard you can use. So in Pages here I can select some art and you can actually enlarge the characters and use these as clipart. So for instance if I wanted to use a crescent moon there you can see I've got it set at 72 point so I can change the point size and make it larger or smaller. You can't make it too big but you can make it large enough that it becomes kind of useful to use as little bits of clipart sometimes in your documents.
So you can also do this on your Mac. Now of course on your Mac you can't swap out your physical keyboard for an Emoji keyboard. But you can go into System Preferences and under there go to Language & Text, not keyboard. Go to Input Sources and there you can turn on the keyboard and character viewer. Once you have that you can see up here in the menu bar right above me is a little icon that you can choose Show Character Viewer and that comes up with this list of characters here and one of the options there is Emoji. Here you can look at pretty much the same characters as you saw before and if you have your cursor inside of a rich text document here I can actually insert a character by just double clicking on it there. Like with on the iPad I can make this a larger size so I can see it and add more characters. So you can see it selected the Apple Color Emoji character set. I can go back to the character viewer and select even more. Just double tap and it enters them in. As you can see they are pretty decent quality. You can certainly use these as clipart.
Now on the Mac you can also use the Emoji characters inside of Messages. Make sure you bring up the characters pallet there and then just double click on any that you want to include. You can use it there in the messages app as well. You are down here typing and you can select anyone of these and it will insert it.
It can be even easier than that for some of the characters. Because if you look you can see this little smiley face next to your typing window. You can tap on that and you can choose from some of the most common ones. So it is very easy to insert these. So you may have in fact gotten messages from people that have these basic ones in there and they know how to do this. But you can get a lot more by using the Characters Pallet here and choosing from the many more options that you've got.
One advantage of these is that they are all very standard and if you actually roll over them you will see like a description at the bottom like grin and you will see the characters that represent it. So if the person at the other end is using a system that doesn't have these characters they should be able to get the regular characters that you see here at the bottom right corner of this little window. Also likewise if you type one of these, so let's type for the regular smile, it should translate to the regular Emoji character when it gets to the other end. Though I can't confirm that. I suppose it depends on what the person has on the other end.
So there is how to use the Emoji characters on your iPad, your iPhone, and you Mac.
I hope you found this useful. Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 777: Emoji Characters For iOS and Mac”

Kendall

12 years ago

Is there a way to assign a keyboard command to quickly bring up the characters pallet?

Gary Rosenzweig

You can't. But in some applications, like TextEdit, you can use Command+Option+T to bring it up. And in others, like Safari, you can get to it in Edit, Special Characters -- so perhaps you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that in System Preferences that is specific to that app.

Paul

I copy and store my smileys and symbols in a draft file in my email

Peter

Thanks for this tip it works fine on my ipad. But, on my imac in pages the character viewer will type everything listed apart from emoji it will however type the emoji into emails can you give me an explanation as to why the emoji will not go into pages.

Right. Pages does not support this special character set. Hopefully one day it will. I think the same is true for Microsoft Word.

Shirley Allan

I found that the Emoji in color will not work in Pages, though the other older Character Viewer images in black e.g., dingbats will. Is this true for you?

SJ Allan

See above.

Oddly, it works fine in text edit. So if you wish to use any of the emoji characters in a pages document, you can then take screen shot of characters and drag that off the desk top into pages , but you can't copy and paste them from one to the other.

Lisa Wilen

I added Emoji keyboard on my iPad and now it won't let me Send any messages. I removed it and just have English keyboard and I still cannot send any messages. Can you help me figure out why?

Never mind. I figured it out that I was typing on the line that says Subject, but there is another line below that you are supposed to type in instead in order to get the Send button active.

alison wright

Thanks Gary. I eventually sussed out that I had to watch the video! Having done so, I was frustrated that I had no icon in top right menu bar to access characters. I did a little rummaging around in Sys.Pref.;Lang.Txt.; and Input Source to discover a tick box at the bottom to "show input menu in menu bar". Thus ✅ I am happily able to add all sorts of childish adornments to my script.👍Hooray!🍻

Hi, i tried this on my mac on facebook status line and facebook msg, but it does't work.

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MacMost Now 777: Emoji Characters For iOS and Mac

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 777: Emoji Characters For iOS and Mac”

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