How do I have unicode characters on GitHub shown as characters rather than icons?

Question

I decided to write the name of this plugin of mine as vim↪softwrap rather than vim-softwrap, but, to my surprise, GitHub shows the ↪ as an icon:

What can I do to avoid that?

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I'm not sure whether it's GitHub that is doing it or it's the Markdown specification to require it.

Answer 1

It looks like it's using these fonts (the css selector being the <g-emoji> tag that it inserts around emoji unicode):

g-emoji {
    font-family: "Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji","Segoe UI Symbol";
}

If you save this as an html file an open it, you will see the same thing:

<p style='font-family: "Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji","Segoe UI Symbol"'>↪</p>