I want to make emoji bigger than the text that surrounds them. At my age and eyesight, it can be difficult to tell the difference between 😃, 😄, and 😊 when they are as small as the text.
Is there a way to use CSS to increase the font size of specific characters without having to wrap them in an extra <span> or similar?
Yes! Although it is a bit of a hack.
This relies on 3 CSS features: src: local(), unicode-range,and size-adjust. Let me walk you through it.
@font-face this tells the browser that we're defining a new font which will be referenced later.
font-family this is the name we're going to be using as a reference.
src: local('Apple Color Emoji') ... CSS can reference local fonts. We don't know what device this page is being viewed on, so we've included a number of popular fallback fonts which should work with all major browsers. You can also reference a webfont if you want - although Emoji fonts tend to have a large filesize. I've adapted this from Marc Fornós' CSS and added a few more common default emoji fonts.
There was some talk of using named ranges but that doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. So, instead, I've extracted all the Emoji codepoints and manually grouped them. It's a pretty long sequence, and I'm sure I've made a few mistakes.
Finally, the body { font-family: "emoji", sans-serif; } tells the browser to use the Emoji font (remember, this will only work on the specified Unicode range) and then fall back to the defaults sans-serif font. Obviously, you can specify whatever fonts you like.
