You copy a symbol, paste it into your bio, and it shows up as an empty
rectangle – – for some people and not others.
Nothing is broken. Here is what is actually happening, and which characters are
safe to use.
The empty box means a missing glyph
Every character you copy is a Unicode code point: a number that identifies it.
Displaying it requires a font on that device containing a drawing for that number.
When the device has the code point but no drawing, you get the box. It is
sometimes called “tofu”, which is where the font name Noto – “no more tofu” –
comes from.
So whether a symbol works is not about the app. It is about the font on the
reader’s device, which is why the same bio looks fine on your phone and broken on
someone else’s.
Fancy fonts are not fonts, and they have a real cost
The “fancy font” text you see in bios – ๐ผ๐ฌ๐ป๐ฒ๐น๐ฝ, ๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐๐ ๐ค๐ฅ๐ฃ๐ฆ๐๐, แดษชษดส แดแดแด๊ฑ – is
not formatting. Those are separate Unicode characters, mostly from a block
intended for mathematical notation. The letters look like letters but are not
letters.
That has consequences worth knowing before you use them:
- Screen readers. A screen reader reading ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ต๐ต๐ธ may announce
it character by character as mathematical symbols, or skip it entirely. To a
blind or low-vision reader, a fancy-font bio can be unreadable. - Search. Searching for your name will not match the
fancy-font version of it, because the characters are different characters. - Rendering. These blocks have thinner font coverage than
ordinary letters, so they are among the most likely to appear as boxes on older
devices.
We publish symbol collections, so this argues against some of our own
material. It is still true, and you should decide knowing it. Fancy fonts are
fine in a caption for effect. In a bio that carries your name or a link, the
accessibility cost is real.
Emoji that show as boxes are usually just new
New emoji are added to Unicode every year, and devices only get the drawings
for them through operating-system updates. Someone on an older phone has no glyph
for a recently added emoji, so they see a box. Nothing you can do to the text
fixes this – only their update does.
Joined emoji fall apart
Emoji such as ๐จโ๐ฉโ๐ง (family) and ๐ฉโ๐ (firefighter) are not single characters. They
are several emoji welded together with an invisible joiner. Where the joiner is
unsupported, the sequence splits into its parts – so ๐ฉโ๐ becomes ๐ฉ๐, a woman
standing next to a fire engine. It looks like a typo. It is a rendering fallback.
What is safe almost everywhere
- Ordinary punctuation, arrows, and geometric shapes: โ โ โ โ โ
- Long-established emoji from the earliest sets: ๐ โค๏ธ ๐ฅ โจ
- Simple box-drawing and dividers: โ โ โ
Riskier: very new emoji, skin-tone and joined sequences, obscure script
blocks, and anything you found described as a “rare” symbol – rare usually means
poorly supported.
Test it before you commit
Paste it, save it, then look at your profile on a different device – ideally an
older one, and one on the other operating system. That is a thirty-second check
that catches nearly everything described on this page.
Found a symbol in our collections that breaks somewhere common? Tell us at
[email protected] and we will note it or pull it.