Reviving Korean Emojis
Warning
Info
Thanks to @sudosubin and the Tossface team for reviving Korean emojis with Unicode PUA!
Background
Tossface is an emoji font from Viva Republica, a Korean (almost) Decacorn company.
It initially included a series of intentionally divergent designs, replacing culturally specific Japanese emojis with designs representing related Korean concepts and outdated technologies with contemporary technologies.
Unfortunately, these replacements drew backlash from multiple stakeholders, and Viva Republica had to remove the emojis.
Unicode Private Use Area
Unicode has a hidden unused area though, from U+E000-F8FF, U+F0000-FFFFD, and U+100000-10FFFD. That's the Unicode Private Use Area. It will remain unassigned for standard emojis, and companies can use it at their own will.
Regrettably, those letters with Korean and contemporary style, in a clean and neat tone and manners, disappeared into history. So I proposed returning the emojis using a standard technology known as Unicode Private Use Area.
About three months later Viva Republica accepted. The emojis came back in Tossface v1.3, from PUA U+E10A to U+E117.
But how shall I type?
But these emojis remained uncharted in the Unicode standard. PUA U+E10A to U+E117 cannot be inputted with the standard keyboard, nor do they appear on the emoji chart. Ironic that we finally got the glyphs back but can't type.
So I built a small site where you can check the glyphs and copy them. I call these Microprojects. They're perfect for trying new tech. I wanted to try Astro, but it kept throwing unrecognizable errors, primarily because the platform was still in an early stage, so I used Next.js, Vercel, and Tailwind.
Now, it somehow became a Museum of Korean Culture
Once the site was up it looked like a museum of Korean culture, so I added some text in English and shared it publicly.
Postmortem
It was a fast, fun project before school started!
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