Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's talk about using Emoji characters on the iPad, iPhone, and
on the Mac.
So here you can see I'm composing a text message and I put in it a character that is actually
not a letter but a picture of a face.
It's a full color graphic image.
You may get a lot of messages like this but you may not know how to put them in your own
messages and in fact not only can you put them in messages but you can put them in emails,
you can put them in your documents, you can type them just as you would type a regular
character.
It's just that you have to know how to do it.
So on the iPhone start by going to Settings.
Under Settings go to General and then from there scroll down to Keyboard.
Here you've got options for Keyboards there.
This allows you to add multiple keyboards.
Now most people just have the one keyboard.
In this case English.
But you can tap on Add a New Keyboard.
Now say you occasionally type in another language like Chinese or Japanese or Greek or any of
these.
You can add it as a secondary, or third or fourth keyboard to what you've got.
You can also add one call Emoji.
So let's go and do that.
So I have two keyboards now.
When I return to my text message app I can see that I've got at the bottom of my keyboard
right there I've got the spacebar, the dictation microphone, and here I've got this little
globe.
That actually lets me switch keyboards.
Most keyboards are international style keyboards so the globe kind of makes sense.
But not so much for Emoji.
Now when I tap that I get all these cool special characters.
I can just tap one like it is a character on a keyboard to type it.
You can see the dots at the top so I can actually swipe and scroll through them.
Not only can I scroll through all of these here but I'm on the "faces" keyboard.
You can see down here at the bottom where it has the little face.
I can switch that to say Recently Used ones which will give you the ones you have most
recently used but also you can tap here and you can see a whole different set of animals
and plants and flowers and moons and things.
Do these other symbols here.
Transportation and maps style symbols and some symbols that are related to numbers and
arrows and all sorts of things.
So you can see there are tons of different symbols and you can scroll through all these
and any one that you want you can add just by typing it.
To switch back to your regular keyboard tap the globe again and it rotates through the
keyboards.
In this case my other keyboard is English US so it just goes back to that.
So I can easily go back and forth between them like that.
Now on the iPad you can go the same thing.
So you go to Settings and General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add a New Keyboard and then you
find Emoji and add that.
Then when you are done with that you can jump to your messages app and then you've got that
little keyboard globe button there and you can swipe through all the different Emoji
characters here and add anyone that you want.
You are not restricted to using this in just text messages.
You can use this in emails.
You can even use it here in Pages.
So anything that has a keyboard you can use.
So in Pages here I can select some art and you can actually enlarge the characters and
use these as clipart.
So for instance if I wanted to use a crescent moon there you can see I've got it set at
72 point so I can change the point size and make it larger or smaller.
You can't make it too big but you can make it large enough that it becomes kind of useful
to use as little bits of clipart sometimes in your documents.
So you can also do this on your Mac.
Now of course on your Mac you can't swap out your physical keyboard for an Emoji keyboard.
But you can go into System Preferences and under there go to Language & Text, not keyboard.
Go to Input Sources and there you can turn on the keyboard and character viewer.
Once you have that you can see up here in the menu bar right above me is a little icon
that you can choose Show Character Viewer and that comes up with this list of characters
here and one of the options there is Emoji.
Here you can look at pretty much the same characters as you saw before and if you have
your cursor inside of a rich text document here I can actually insert a character by
just double clicking on it there.
Like with on the iPad I can make this a larger size so I can see it and add more characters.
So you can see it selected the Apple Color Emoji character set.
I can go back to the character viewer and select even more.
Just double tap and it enters them in.
As you can see they are pretty decent quality.
You can certainly use these as clipart.
Now on the Mac you can also use the Emoji characters inside of Messages.
Make sure you bring up the characters pallet there and then just double click on any that
you want to include.
You can use it there in the messages app as well.
You are down here typing and you can select anyone of these and it will insert it.
It can be even easier than that for some of the characters.
Because if you look you can see this little smiley face next to your typing window.
You can tap on that and you can choose from some of the most common ones.
So it is very easy to insert these.
So you may have in fact gotten messages from people that have these basic ones in there
and they know how to do this.
But you can get a lot more by using the Characters Pallet here and choosing from the many more
options that you've got.
One advantage of these is that they are all very standard and if you actually roll over
them you will see like a description at the bottom like grin and you will see the characters
that represent it.
So if the person at the other end is using a system that doesn't have these characters
they should be able to get the regular characters that you see here at the bottom right corner
of this little window.
Also likewise if you type one of these, so let's type for the regular smile, it should
translate to the regular Emoji character when it gets to the other end.
Though I can't confirm that.
I suppose it depends on what the person has on the other end.
So there is how to use the Emoji characters on your iPad, your iPhone, and you Mac.
I hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.