title: Unity: How to use TextMesh to display Emojis
body: <p>I am making a 3D environment in Unity which is designed to retrieve Tweets and display them using Unity's TextMesh. The problem arises when a tweet includes an emoji (emoticons such as  and , which should appear as smiley faces in your browser). 
  When a tweet includes one of these characters, unity renders them as either a "?" symbol, or the following symbol in the editor: 
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/A2UYp.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/A2UYp.png" alt="What emoticons look like rendered in the Unity Editor"></a></p>
  
  <p>...and like this when using a TextMesh:
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/bx3XA.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/bx3XA.png" alt="Emoticons rendered with a TextMesh using Myriad Pro font"></a></p>
  
  <h2>What Do I Want?</h2>
  
  <p>All I need is to represent any smiley/emoticon as character in the TextMesh, using a TTF font. I <em>don't need</em> to show a full colour image (like your browser/phone does) of the emoji. I realise that there are some extensions in the Unity store which allow you to do that - TextMesh Pro for example. If there's an easy way of doing this though, it would be better than plain characters.</p>
  
  <p>I am specifically looking to do this using TextMesh, not in any of the new GUI system components.</p>
  
  <h2>Things I've Tried</h2>
  
  <ol>
  <li>You'd have thought that by downloading a font which contains characters for all of the emoticons you can imagine with their correct encoding, and using this as the font for the TextMesh would solve the problem. This was unfortunately not the case when I tried using Symbola (<a href="http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/</a>). This, along with some other fonts rendered the "?" symbol despite having characters for the emoticons being used.</li>
  </ol>