Add unicode emoji in Overleaf tex file

Question

I'm trying to find a package that would allow me to include the following sentence in my tex file:

A really good initiative 👏✌️

I tried

\setmainfont{DejaVu Sans}

but I could't manage to make it work. It appears that there are some emojis missing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[NB: Please use Safari on Mac, Firefox on Linux, and Chrome on Windows to see this question with the correct emoji encoding. Otherwise, you may see one regular emoji and one unknown char as a rectangle instead of skin tone emoji.]

Answer 1

In the end, I used:

\usepackage{scalerel,graphicx,xparse}

\NewDocumentCommand\emojione{}{\scalerel*{\includegraphics{1F44F}}{X}}
\NewDocumentCommand\emojitwo{}{\scalerel*{\includegraphics{270C}}{X}}

where 1F44F and 270C are the emojis that I wanted to include uploaded as pdf files.

Hope this will help someone else also.

Answer 2

I found this Overleaf Project helpful for rendering both colored and monochrome emojis in OverLeaf. The same trick can be applied to Emoji Skin Tone Modifiers in Overleaf where the modifier comes right after the emoji Unicode.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newfontfamily{\NotoEmoji}
  {NotoColorEmoji.ttf}[Renderer=Harfbuzz]
\newfontfamily{\SymbolaEmoji}{Symbola}

\begin{document}

    {\Large 
    \NotoEmoji
    
    % Waving Hand emoji
    \symbol{"1F44B}%
    
    % Waving Hand: Light Skin Tone 
    \symbol{"1F44B}\symbol{"1F3FB}
    } 
    
\end{document}

Expected Output 👋 👋🏻