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An Introduction to emojifont package

Guangchuang Yu

2026-02-27

emojifont: using emoji font in R

The emojifont package is designed to bring emoji font to R users. It packs emoji fonts and uses showtext to render the fonts so they can be used in base plots or ggplot2.

Installation

Get the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("emojifont")

Or the development version from GitHub:

## install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("GuangchuangYu/emojifont")

Emoji characters

To use emoji, we need to use their corresponding unicode. Emoji unicode can be found in https://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode, or searched using search_emoji. search_emoji returns emoji aliases which can be converted to unicode by emoji.

search_emoji("smile")
[1] "smiley"      "smile"       "sweat_smile" "smiley_cat"  "smile_cat"  
emoji(search_emoji("smile"))
[1] "😃" "😄" "😅" "😺" "😸"

Emoji in R plot

base plot

set.seed(123)
x <- rnorm(10)
set.seed(321)
y <- rnorm(10)
plot(x, y, cex = 0)
text(x, y, labels = emoji("cow"), cex = 1.5, col = "steelblue", family = "OpenMoji")

ggplot2

d <- data.frame(
  x = x, y = y,
  label = sample(c(emoji("cow"), emoji("camel")), 10, replace = TRUE),
  type = sample(LETTERS[1:3], 10, replace = TRUE)
)

library(ggplot2)
ggplot(d, aes(x, y, color = type, label = label)) +
  geom_text(family = "OpenMoji", size = 6)

To make it easy to use with ggplot2, a simple layer geom_emoji is provided.

ggplot() + geom_emoji("rose", color = "steelblue") + theme_void()

x <- seq(0, 2 * pi, length = 30)
y <- sin(x)
ggplot() + geom_emoji("heartbeat", x = x, y = y, size = 10)

Emoji in tables

You can also use emoji within HTML tables by placing Unicode emoji into cells. Here we use knitr::kable() to render a simple table.

library(emojifont)
library(knitr)

df <- data.frame(
  name  = c("Cow", "Camel", "Heartbeat"),
  emoji = emoji(c("cow", "camel", "heartbeat")),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

kable(df, format = "html")
name emoji
Cow 🐮
Camel 🐫
Heartbeat 💓

Font Awesome

The package also supports Font Awesome icons.

library(ggplot2)
set.seed(20160309)
fa <- fontawesome(c("fa-github", "fa-weibo", "fa-twitter", "fa-android", "fa-coffee"))
d <- data.frame(
  x = rnorm(20),
  y = rnorm(20),
  label = sample(fa, 20, replace = TRUE)
)

ggplot(d, aes(x, y, color = label, label = label)) +
  geom_text(family = "fontawesome-webfont", size = 6) +
  xlab(NULL) + ylab(NULL) +
  theme(legend.text = element_text(family = "fontawesome-webfont"))

A corresponding geom_fontawesome is also provided.

ggplot() + geom_fontawesome("fa-github", color = "black") + theme_void()

phylomoji

Creating phylomoji is possible using emojifont and ggtree, please refer to: https://yulab-smu.top/treedata-book/chapter8.html#phylomoji.

Limitation

RStudio uses a different graphics device handling and showtext may be incompatible with it. Since emojifont uses showtext as backend to parse emoji font, it may also be incompatible with RStudio. Consider manually opening a device (X11() in Linux, quartz() in macOS or windows() in Windows).

Note

Currently, this package supports Emoji Font and Font Awesome.

Feel free to fork this package to add your favorite iconic fonts.

Bugs/Feature requests

If you have any, let me know: https://github.com/GuangchuangYu/emojifont/issues.

Session info

Here is the output of sessionInfo() on the system on which this document was compiled:

sessionInfo()
R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 26200)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=C                               
[2] LC_CTYPE=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                               
[5] LC_TIME=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8    

time zone: Asia/Shanghai
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] knitr_1.51      ggplot2_4.0.2   emojifont_0.6.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] vctrs_0.7.1        cli_3.6.5          rlang_1.1.7        xfun_0.56         
 [5] otel_0.2.0         showtextdb_3.0     sysfonts_0.8.9     generics_0.1.4    
 [9] proto_1.0.0        S7_0.2.1           jsonlite_2.0.0     labeling_0.4.3    
[13] glue_1.8.0         htmltools_0.5.9    scales_1.4.0       rmarkdown_2.30    
[17] grid_4.5.2         tibble_3.3.1       evaluate_1.0.5     fastmap_1.2.0     
[21] yaml_2.3.12        lifecycle_1.0.5    compiler_4.5.2     dplyr_1.2.0       
[25] RColorBrewer_1.1-3 pkgconfig_2.0.3    farver_2.1.2       digest_0.6.39     
[29] R6_2.6.1           tidyselect_1.2.1   showtext_0.9-7     pillar_1.11.1     
[33] magrittr_2.0.4     withr_3.0.2        tools_4.5.2        gtable_0.3.6

ub.com/GuangchuangYu/emojifont/issues>.

Session info

Here is the output of sessionInfo() on the system on which this document was compiled:

sessionInfo()
R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 11 x64 (build 26200)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=C                               
[2] LC_CTYPE=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                               
[5] LC_TIME=Chinese (Simplified)_China.utf8    

time zone: Asia/Shanghai
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] knitr_1.51      ggplot2_4.0.2   emojifont_0.6.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] vctrs_0.7.1        cli_3.6.5          rlang_1.1.7        xfun_0.56         
 [5] otel_0.2.0         showtextdb_3.0     sysfonts_0.8.9     generics_0.1.4    
 [9] proto_1.0.0        S7_0.2.1           jsonlite_2.0.0     labeling_0.4.3    
[13] glue_1.8.0         htmltools_0.5.9    scales_1.4.0       rmarkdown_2.30    
[17] grid_4.5.2         tibble_3.3.1       evaluate_1.0.5     fastmap_1.2.0     
[21] yaml_2.3.12        lifecycle_1.0.5    compiler_4.5.2     dplyr_1.2.0       
[25] RColorBrewer_1.1-3 pkgconfig_2.0.3    farver_2.1.2       digest_0.6.39     
[29] R6_2.6.1           tidyselect_1.2.1   showtext_0.9-7     pillar_1.11.1     
[33] magrittr_2.0.4     withr_3.0.2        tools_4.5.2        gtable_0.3.6

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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