why are emojis not appearing on Instagram with high sierra safari?

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Quit the application.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.FontBook.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

Hey Fraser,

I was able to better isolate the problem in my case. I’m discussing it also in another thread:

Since High Sierra, Safari won't display emojis or other strange characters, showing a question mark instead

Last resort characters are used whenever Safari can’t “access” emojis (or other specific characters) on some webpages (in this case it seems those using the new CSS system font stacks “-apple-system”).

If I enable Font Book auto-activation through Terminal the problem disappears and the plist is updated with the new “preference”, otherwise I get the [?] characters.

FontExplorer requires Font Book auto-activation to be disabled in order to avoid conflicts (this is why it triggers that plist file creation, in which it turns off auto-activation), hence the problem... Maybe Suitcase is not that picky! 😉

You should be able to recreate the problem, enabling/disabling font auto-activation for Font Book (in previous MacOS versions this was a checkbox in Font Book preferences window, now you have to use Terminal app)

- enabling it from the Terminal app

atsutil autoactivation -e

Close and reopen Safari on Instagram and you should see EMOJIS

- disabling it from the Terminal app

atsutil autoactivation -d

Close and reopen Safari on Instagram, now you should see LAST RESORT [?]

Hi, I have the same problem as you, guys.

From what I've found this seems not to be limited to Instagram only, but to all those pages that use the new CSS System Font stacks — please check System Font Stack Experiments

I'd like to share what I tried, just a clue, not a fix tho.

I logged on my mac as a new user and the issue wasn't present so I guessed it was not system-related.

So I started investigating my standard user folder and I was able to recreate a situation in which this doesn't happen but unfortunately this is not a permanent fix. 😟

I've discovered that deleting Apple Type Service preference file (I guess it's useful only if you use Font Book as a font manager):

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ATS.plist

"fixes" the problem.

Unfortunately the font manager I use — FontExplorer X Pro — needs "automatic font activation" in Font Book preferences be disabled to work properly, so FontExplorer RECREATES that file each time it can't find it...

It's specific to instagram and seems to be some kind of font issue since the system at least for me uses last resort characters [?] instead of emoji. Even when I type them they show up as last resort so I really don't understand

😒🔛🔛😂☺😊😘

These emoji show up fine for me but now instagram is full of question marks

Update: I have tried changing the style of a post on instagram through the develop feature and the emoji showed up when I changed the font to sans-serif so I am pretty sure it is some facebook/instagram attempt to play around with the emoji font which can't be displayed on safari for some reason

According to jklstudios.com on the font management article, "Messages now requires the fonts AppleSDGothicNeo.ttc and ヒラギノ角ゴシック W3.ttc to display emojis". I am guessing this was at least part of the problem, as it also mentions a framework installed for safari 11.0.1 being a possible cause

Open the Terminal Application. Then copy the posted command making sure you don't add any spaces. Paste it into Terminal after the $, then hit return.

I have noticed that it wasn't misbehaving on my other Mac but that was running a different operating system. Having updated it the emojis still appear fine. It's a very strange bug. Personally I have tried FontBook and Suitcase as my font managers and it didn't change anything really although I did delete/reset the font caches. Maybe if you were to let me see the contents of the plist file and try and cross reference with my own we could work out if there is a setting that is preventing it from working. My knowledge of emoji fonts though, is considerably lacking

You are welcome. That is another way to see the user Library.