So you just posted something on your Facebook with a smiling face to express how you feel. You type, click to send and when the message appears on your timeline, your smiling face is replaced by a dotted box called OBJ and your message looks disgusting.
At this point, if you try to navigate and look at other people’s messages, you will notice that you don’t see any smilies, just dots. Don’t worry, this is not a serious problem that other people may or may not have in your diet.
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To understand what is going on, we need to get used to the way computers interpret what appears on our screens.
In fact, everything you see on your phone or PC screen is some kind of object. The strange window you now see on the screen is nothing more than a springboard for a certain character, in this case your smiling face in Unicode.
Unicode (Universal Code of Character Sets) is a standard for displaying the millions of different characters we see on our screens every day. It includes all common symbols, characters, alphabets and even smileys.
This makes it easier for computers to understand each other, regardless of the language between a particular end user and his or her computer.
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The filling you see is called the object replacement symbol. It appears when the software you are using does not know how to display a particular icon from another software. In this case, the Facebook application does not know how to display the smiling face of your phone.
You shouldn’t see the problem, and here are three reasons why you might see it.
Using Voice in Text on iPhone
Yes, it’s very useful on most phones these days to enter text with your voice, but when you do it on your iPhone, it’s encoded by an Apple translator, so Facebook doesn’t know how to display it yet.
Apple has updated the Emoji library.
Another common reason, and it happens every time Apple or Android updates its emoji library. The frequency with which Apple does this, however, causes this error much more often than on other platforms.
The basic rule is this one: When a user writes emoticons with an updated smiley library, only the user and people who have updated the latest library can see these emoticons.
If your software or application does not have access to this library and therefore does not have the correct Unicode, you will get this error.
Software error
If you’ve used an Android device to publish your status and you’re sure you’re okay, there may be a point where it’s just a software error because your text is miscoded.
It may also be a bug in your specific Facebook application or your font libraries may not be up to date. Normally, updating your operating system will solve these problems.
