How to display emojis in ggplot2 using emo package in R? - r

Question

I am trying to use ggplot2 to plot some graphs with emojis shown as labels using the emo package. I've learned it from this post, but it's simply not working.
I have tried the emojifont package before, but it's a font type that renders emojis in black and white and it requires opening a new graphics device using e.g. quartz().
To go around the color problem, Tino has suggested (refer to the post above) using the gridSVG package, i.e. after creating a new graphics device and plotting with emojifont, save the graph ps = grid.export("emoji.svg", addClass=T) on local disk as a .svg file that renders emojis in a colorful style.
I would really appreciate a solution that (a) gives colorful emojis and (b) showing the graph directly, which is compatible with routine ggplot use cases.
library(ggplot2)
library(emo)
names = c("smile","school","office","blush","smirk","heart_eyes")
n = length(names):1
e = sapply(names, emo::ji)
dat = data.frame(emoji_name = names, n = n, emoji = e, stringsAsFactors = F)
ggplot(data=dat, aes(emoji_name, n)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
scale_x_discrete(breaks = dat$emoji_name, labels = dat$emoji) +
coord_flip()
My R version is
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.4 (2018-03-15)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sierra 10.12

Answer 1

use the emojifont package :)
read more here
library(ggplot2)
library(emojifont)
names = c("smile","school","office","blush","smirk","heart_eyes")
n = length(names):1
e = sapply(names, emojifont::emoji)
dat = data.frame(emoji_name = names, n = n, emoji = e, stringsAsFactors = F)
ggplot(data=dat, aes(emoji_name, n)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
scale_x_discrete(breaks = dat$emoji_name, labels = dat$emoji) +
theme( axis.text.y =element_text( size=20 ) ) +
coord_flip()
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)

Answer 2

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
#remotes::install_github("hadley/emo")
library(emo)
dat <- tibble(names = c("smile","school","office","blush","smirk","heart_eyes"),
emoji = map_chr(names, emo::ji)) %>%
tibble::rowid_to_column("n")
dat %>% ggplot(aes(n, emoji)) +
geom_col(orientation="y") +
theme(axis.text.y = element_text(size = 18))
sessioninfo::session_info()
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Created on 2020-04-07 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)