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I’ve been using Jekyll as my static blog generator for a few years now but noticed a minor annoyance a few days ago; whenever I use footnotes¹, the return arrow (↩︎) is converted into an emoji (↩️) on iOS and in some RSS readers. Obviously this isn’t desirable and so after a bit of digging I was able to find a fix.

Firstly, this isn’t an issue with Jekyll but with kramdown which does the Markdown conversion. Thankfully, there is a config option in kramdown 1.8.0 and above² that lets you specify the text you want to use for the footnote return link and you can set it as unicode to stop it being converted to emoji. Just add the following to your _config.yml file:

kramdown:
  	  footnote_backlink: "↩︎"

Regenerate your site and you should find that the emoji arrow is now back to a ↩︎.