In yixuan/fontemoji: Using 'Emoji' Font in R Graphs

Easy Emoji!

Plotting emojis in R can be as easy as plotting regular text. The idea is to use the remoji package to obtain emoji strings, and to use the showtext package to draw the symbols. The fontemoji package loads the OpenSansEmoji font (included in the package) and registers it to the showtext database with the family name "emoji", so that emojis can be plotted using any text drawing functions in R.

Base Graphics

Below is a quick example:

library(showtext)
library(fontemoji)
library(remoji)

showtext.auto()

set.seed(123)
x11()
plot(1, type = "n", xlim = c(0, 12), ylim = c(0, 12),
     xlab = "Days left towards deadline", ylab = "Tasks to do")
text(rnorm(20, 7, 2), rnorm(20, 4, 2), emoji("smile"), col = "red",
     cex = 2, family = "emoji")
text(rnorm(20, 4, 2), rnorm(20, 7, 2), emoji("cry"), col = "steelblue",
     cex = 2, family = "emoji")

The names of emoji symbols can be found in the Emoji cheat sheet.

ggplot2 Graphics

Want some ggplot2-flavored plots? The idea is the same:

library(showtext)
library(fontemoji)
library(remoji)
library(ggplot2)

showtext.auto()

dat = data.frame(x = emoji(c("+1", "-1")), y = c(1000, 100))
x11()
ggplot(dat, aes(x = x, y = y)) +
    geom_bar(aes(fill = x), stat = "identity", width = 0.5) +
    scale_fill_hue("", labels = sub_emoji(c("Good! :satisfied:",
                                            "Oh no... :disappointed:"))) +
    xlab("") + ylab("Votes") + ggtitle("How Do You Like This Package?") +
    theme(axis.text.x = element_text(family = "emoji", size = 30),
          legend.text = element_text(family = "emoji", size = 20),
          legend.key.size = grid::unit(1, "cm"),
          title = element_text(size = 20))