Emoji images replacing styled theme elements

[vashmyvindows]

Since WordPress 4.2's addition of automatic front-end Emoji support, many UTF-8 icons used in the theme itself are replaced automatically, whether or not the designer had styled them specifically with a custom webfont. This tends to happen to glyphs that are already defined in the UTF-8 space, but are often replaced with theme-specific assets (magnifying glass, "location" pushpin, etc). Attached are examples of glyphs that were replaced in a basic webfont.

This doesn't apply to icons inserted using the CSS ::before/after pseudo-elements, only those that are part of the document.

I'm sure there's a good reason that Emoji support is applied to the entire front-end rather than just the the areas that seem to need it (content, titles, feeds, etc.), but that would alleviate the problem.

[swissspidy]

Sounds like expected behaviour to me. These are unicode characters that are commonly mapped to emojis.

I thought web fonts are supposed to use private use areas in the unicode range. Detecting if there are already styles applied to the characters seems like overkill to me.

[rmccue]

Web fonts should definitely be using private use areas; you'll actually hit other problems if the web font is taking over emoji. (Some renderers/browsers force the font for emoji characters.)