Dear Christoph,
there is no specification that emoji must be fixed-width characters. Emojis were originally used on Japanese mobile devices, but even their East_Asian_Width property varies. The guidelines for submitting Unicode emoji proposals only states that you must include examples with the sizes 18×18 and 72×72 px as examples. Everything else depends on the implementation. For example, not every font may have ligatures all ZWJ sequences.
W3Tutorials states that emojis are are often designed with variable widths [1] and users on StackOverflow suggest to use tabs to align emojis properly.[2]
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66496671/is-there-a-blank-unicode-character-matching-emoji-width
What is the purpose of that suggestion? If you use a monospace font, you can use any spacing character to align characters.
Best Regards
Marius
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 20. Mai 2026 um 10:11
Von: "Christoph Päper via Unicode" <[email protected]>
An: "via Unicode" <[email protected]>
Betreff: Proposing an Emoji Space character
Last year I had drafted a proposal for adding a (White) Space Emoji character to Unicode, but unfortunately failed to meet the submission deadline. Since the process started again in April, I am now revising the document and was wondering again: Will it be declined simply because it fails to meet the formal requirements? <https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html>
As an invisible character with the metrics of an emoji glyph, I can hardly provide any evidence of frequency by using the means described in the document. (I think they are severely flawed and inappropriate for assessing the value of other proposed emojis as well, but that is not the point here.) Do you have any advice on how to argue here?
Also, which character name should I suggest?
- EMOJI SPACE
- SPACE EMOJI
- WHITE SPACE EMOJI
- WHITESPACE EMOJI
- SPACING EMOJI
- TRANSPARENT SQUARE EMOJI
- INVISIBLE SQUARE EMOJI
- …
Do I explicitly need to refute possible alternatives like U+0020+FE0F (SPACE + VS-16) or U+3000+FE0F (IDEOGRAHPIC SPACE + VS-16), or even plain U+3000?
Within the block U+2000…206F “General Punctuation”, which, particularly in its first row, contains many whitespace characters, U+2065 is the only position left unassigned still. Would it be a likely one for an emoji character? (U+203C and U+203A are first-generation emojis.)
Should I suggest any character properties that are different from normal emojis?
