2

I am using the unicode black telephone character (☎ U+260E) in html email. On the iOS Mail app (tested on iPhone and iPad) the black telephone character is rendered as a illustrated as a red emoji phone icon.

unicode telephone icons

Note that the unicode white telephone character (☏ U+260F) is not displayed as emoji.

I've tried to force the font to "Helvetica" …but no luck.

Is there any way to force iOS Mail to use the flat black telephone unicode character?

Beau Smith
  • 33,433
  • 13
  • 94
  • 101
  • 2
    Forcing the font to Helvetica probably doesn't work because the character isn't in Helvetica. On OS X, it looks like it falls back to Hiragino Kaku Gothic W3 (which is also [available on iOS](http://iosfonts.com)), so you might try forcing that font? Failing that, a red phone might be useful if you need to call Batman... – rickster Apr 02 '13 at 06:03
  • 1
    Yes, I find that `font-family: Hiragino Sans, sans-serif;` works. – Richard Fairhurst Jul 22 '22 at 16:34

2 Answers2

5

I cannot test this in iOS Mail, and I doubt whether it will work there, but this is the way that a specific glyph variant could be selected. According to the Unicode Standard, you can select a standardized variant “BLACK TELEPHONE text style” (as opposite to “BLACK TELEPHONE emoji style”) by immediately following U+260E by the control character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15.

In HTML, the character sequence U+260E U+FE0E can be written as ☎︎.

But I’m afraid software support to variation selectors is still very limited. For example, web browsers seem to fail with it in different ways.

Jukka K. Korpela
  • 195,524
  • 37
  • 270
  • 390
4

A little more than a year late, but specify the font like so to fix this:

<span style="font-family:dingbats, arial unicode ms, code2000, sans-serif;">&#x260e;</span>
kpb
  • 51
  • 4