Emoji in Matplotlib figures on OS X

Question

I have an exotic task for Matplpoltlib for which I need to display emoji inside labels. I am using OS X, so there is a good system-wide support of emoji. However, things do not work out with Matplotlib: currently, emoji get displayed as empty boxes. I am using Python 3, so Unicode should not be a problem. Thank you 😀

Answer 1

The idea behind it is not very difficult but in order to get it to be displayed (at least on ubunto) it gave me some hard time as not all fonts support emoji. I shall display the straight forward way but for some of the steps I had to make are detailed here in case you encounter any difficulties.

From emoji cheat sheet from the emoji python package I picked up three to be shown as an example and here is the code.

G = nx.Graph()
G.add_nodes_from([0,1,2])
n0 = emoji.emojize(':thumbsup:',use_aliases=True)
n1 = emoji.emojize(':sob:',use_aliases=True)
n2 = emoji.emojize(':joy:',use_aliases=True)
labels ={0:n0,1:n1,2:n2}
nx.draw_networkx(G,labels=labels, node_color = 'w', linewidths=0, with_labels=True, font_family = 'Symbola' ,font_size = 35)    
plt.show()