Prevent character being drawn as emoji

You can try using the EmojiCompat library, described here and here. Add it to your dependencies;

dependencies {    ...    implementation "com.android.support:support-emoji:27.1.1"    implementation "com.android.support:support-emoji-bundled:27.1.1"    ...}

Initialize the library;

EmojiCompat.init(new BundledEmojiCompatConfig(this).setReplaceAll(true));

And then replace TextView with EmojiTextView. Here's an example you can use to test:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"    android:layout_width="match_parent"    android:layout_height="match_parent"    android:orientation="vertical"    tools:ignore="HardcodedText">    <!-- replace -->    <TextView        android:layout_width="wrap_content"        android:layout_height="wrap_content"        android:textSize="16sp"        android:text="TextView - default: \u270c, text: \u270c\ufe0e, emoji: \u270c\ufe0f"/>    <!-- with -->    <android.support.text.emoji.widget.EmojiTextView        android:layout_width="wrap_content"        android:layout_height="wrap_content"        android:textSize="16sp"        android:text="EmojiTextView - default: \u270c, text: \u270c\ufe0e, emoji: \u270c\ufe0f"/></LinearLayout>

If it doesn't work how you would like, remove .setReplaceAll(true) from the initialization line, try again, and see if that works.

EDIT:

If you want to draw the emoji text manually e.g. to a canvas, you can do it with EmojiCompat.process(...) and android.text.StaticLayout. I haven't tried it so there might be errors, but it should work.

// assuming x, y, and paint are definedCharSequence emoji = EmojiCompat.get().process("\u270c\ufe0e");StaticLayout layout = new StaticLayout(emoji, paint,     canvas.getWidth(), Layout.Alignment.ALIGN_NORMAL, 1.0f, 0.0f, false);canvas.translate(x, y);layout.draw(canvas);canvas.translate(-x, -y);

You can try Fontawesome. You won't need to download the whole library. Just the ttf file from the website. It's around 18MB.

https://fontawesome.com/get-started

Then you can use the strings in the cheat sheet to draw icons.

https://fontawesome.com/cheatsheet

Copy the ttf file to your assets folder.

Typeface typeface = Typeface.createFromAsset(context.getAssets(),"fontawesome_webfont_4.ttf");paint.setTypeface(typeface);canvas.drawText("\uf25b", x, y, paint);

You can find \uf25b in the cheatsheet as f25b. It's the peace icon.