11 ms·

Unicode Text Converter

908 points by sysk 12y ago

anjbe 12y ago
I’ve never been a fan of this sort of thing. The Unicode characters in these font blocks are not letters for making words; at least the double‐struck, fraktur, bold, italic, and bold italics are semantically for use in mathematical equations. This can have some strange effects if you try to use them like letters. Example: What’s the lowercase transform of 𝑼? 𝑼! Not 𝒖.
sjwright 12y ago
The question I have is, what's the easiest way to strip this 🅹🆄🅽🅺 out of unicode strings submitted by web users? With a nod to Cunningham's Law, surely the right answer is a regular expression?
- atlbeer 12y ago
  Depends on the language... but, the "correct" answer is support unicode and welcome yourself into a world of pain.
  - dsjoerg 12y ago
    Glad you put "correct" in scare quotes, because that "correct" answer is certainly not correct.
- NaNaN 12y ago
  You can use “Adobe Blank”[1] and CSS @font-face{unicode-range:} to hide them. [1]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    So now the text won't show up at all? Wonderful :/
noobermin 12y ago
Ｑｕｉｔｅａｗａｙｔｏｍａｋｅｔｈｅｐｏｉｎｔ．
Systemic33 12y ago
Well that definitely takes the 𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕫𝕖 for most noticeable Hacker News submission. Suggestion (if you are author): There are a lot of chars that look like another char, often used on the web, so i think that there are more advanced versions to be made. I think i read that a lot of thai signs and cyrillic look like latin chars.
- samuellevy 12y ago
  Yeah, it's great fun to put a cyrillic "а" into a variable name in code.
  - Systemic33 12y ago
    Oh it can get much much worse... have a look at greek questionmark: "[...] canonically decomposes to U+003B ; semicolon making the marks identical in practice." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_mark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_ma...
    - nl 12y ago
      Oh that is awesome! I wonder if Java uses it as a semi-colon too?
      - Systemic33 12y ago
        I have only tested it with javescript, which gave a syntax error.
  - solistice 12y ago
    or having your variable names in _𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗 which might be more appearent but none the less annoying. That'd make a nice useless language though. 𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖈 𝖛𝖔𝖎𝖉[] 𝖒𝖆𝖎𝖓(𝖘𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌[] 𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖘) { 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖔𝖑𝖊.𝖂𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖊𝕷𝖎𝖓𝖊("𝕳𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔 𝖂𝖊𝖑𝖙"); } // 𝕽𝖊𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖓𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖓𝖘𝖕𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖊 "𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗" 𝕰𝖎𝖓𝖘 𝕻𝖚𝖓𝖐𝖙 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑
robjh 12y ago
For others without that specific font or what have you: "Unicode Text Converter" On my windows box with chrome all i see are empty boxes.
- TheAnimus 12y ago
  Use IE (wow, don't say that often) it has much better typography support, if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful.
  - rossy 12y ago
    > if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful I'm fairly sure this is no longer the case. Chrome is high-DPI aware on Windows now, and it uses DirectWrite for font rendering, the same as IE. It just can't display these characters for some reason.
    - mahouse 12y ago
      I think he does not only mean the font rendering, but the UI itself. Anyway, DirectWrite was horrible at high DPI, if I remember correctly.
      - rossy 12y ago
        Nope, the UI got an update too. It renders at high-DPI on Windows. Chrome on a high-DPI machine looks exactly the same as on a low-DPI machine, except sharper. It used to be plagued with issues, but I'm fairly sure they're all gone now. DirectWrite isn't perfect. It still has weird hinting and kerning at high-DPI with some fonts, but it's better than GDI. I find Chrome better than IE, actually. IE ignores my DPI settings and scales pages to 250%, so everything looks too large. Chrome renders correctly at 200%.
  - robjh 12y ago
    That's interesting. These comments make a lot more sense in IE11. 𝒃𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒕 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒓 11 This reminds me of the 1990s. haha
hliyan 12y ago
Impressive! Hopefully, this won't end with HN sanitizing everything except latin + latin extended from submissions.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Well it does / should make people rethink allowing UTF-8 by default in user-generated content. I wonder if the stuff generated by http://www.eeemo.net/ http://www.eeemo.net/ works here: Z̡̖̥̙̱͓A̶͚̬̺L̷͖͓Ģ͕O̳̮!̗
  - rikkus 12y ago
    Nice utility. What should I tag it with in my bookmarks though?
    - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      ̶He҉ who Wa̧i̴t̢s ̴Beh͟in͠d̢ T͢h́e W͡all͏.
  - joezydeco 12y ago
    #فͤ҈ͨͥ҉҉ͦ҈҉ͨ҈ͩ҉ͪ҈ͣͯͫ҉ͥͬͨ҈ͭ҉ͮ҈ͯ҉ͨ҈ͭͭͬ҉ͧͥ҈ͣ҉ͨ҉҉҈ͧͥ҉ͯ҈ͮͥ҉ͭ҈ͤ҈ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҈ͩͯ҉ͭ҈ͨ҉ͨͥ҉҉ͣ҉ͣͪ҉ͧ҈ͭ҉ͩ҈ͤ҉ͮ҈ͯͥ҈ͬ҈ͭ҈ͦ҈ͨͣ҉ͥ҈ͯ҉҉ͣͧ҈ͫ҉ͭ҈ͥͯͯ҉ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҉҈ͩ҉ͭ҈ͣͨ҉ͣͥ҈ͪ҉ͧ҈ͭᅠ'̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ ᅠᅠ'̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋ กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็ก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ▲▲▲̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ Works for me.
    - spyder 12y ago
      This comment has a strange behavior in Firefox, which is not surprising but it's probably a bug: When I scrolling to this comment there is no characters outside of the comment box but when i switch back to this page from another tab then the characters are going outside the comment box.
tempodox 12y ago
It works :) 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒓 comes in a fancy bold italic font in my HN list. I love this hack.
- eterm 12y ago
  Oddly in Firefox the tab name showing the title only gets as far as 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐 before giving up with what looks like a box with D835 in it.
  - acqq 12y ago
    The tab name is shortened in the middle of the sequence. I still don't know what the sequence is though, any Unicode expert to explain? Apparently is d835 "invalid"? http://www.charbase.com/d835-unicode-invalid-character http://www.charbase.com/d835-unicode-invalid-character Edit: I see now emillon explains: "U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f." That's: http://codepoints.net/U+1D48F http://codepoints.net/U+1D48F "MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL N"
  - razzmataz 12y ago
    I get 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...
sanxiyn 12y ago
https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/533848879423578112 https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/533848879423578112
gojomo 12y ago
Hey! I was just thinking about this site, and visited it for the first time in years, after mentioning the old San Francisco ransom-font in another thread. By randomly mixing these Unicode letter and letterlike characters, you can simulate a cut-and-paste ransom-note. For example, an acquired company could announce changes to its privacy policy: wE ℎåve yøuR ρrIvᴀçy ⅈn a ᴡiNdøwleSs ℞oøm, & ℙℓaℕ τø ⅆo µnSρεaKᴀble †hiℕℊs t○ ⅈt
- hanula 12y ago
  Heh, I created something like that in Python: https://github.com/hanula/weirdify https://github.com/hanula/weirdify while playing with unicodedata module.
horse_continuum 12y ago
One of my friends, moving to China for a semester to teach, was thinking of using a proper Chinese name to make it easier for students to address him. He had a good idea, even, which he shared on Facebook. I proposed that we should name him after the lack of unicode support in our browsers, and we ended up calling him "Box Boxbox" for a couple of months.
kcorbitt 12y ago
Just a PSA for discoverability: since the replacement characters use different code points than their more standard equivalents, the default HN search (https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com) at least doesn't find this submission when searching for "unicode."
emillon 12y ago
Funny how it triggered a bug in Firefox. When the tab is unfocused, its title in the handle is "𝑼𝒏…", but when it gets the focus it becomes "𝑼<D835>…" (in a square box). The next codepoint is U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f. I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes and that it can't make sense of d8 35, but I'm not too sure how to fix that since graphemes can have arbitrary length (right?). Do you have to compute the width in advance?
- jabiko 12y ago
  It seems like this is a known bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921528 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921528
- anon1385 12y ago
  http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ There are libraries for doing it in Javascript: https://www.npmjs.org/package/grapheme-breaker https://www.npmjs.org/package/grapheme-breaker (is that part of the Firefox UI done in Javascript? I've no idea)
- pwnna 12y ago
  Hm.. i'm on nightly and seems to be unaffected by this problem.
  - emillon 12y ago
    It depends on the size of the tab headers.
- pc86 12y ago
  I am using FF Dev Edition and see "Unico<D835>..." regardless of focus. Weird.
- aninhumer 12y ago
  >I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes This seems likely, as another notable weirdness is that even with full width tabs, where there's plenty of space for at least "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕..." it still only shows "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...".
rossy 12y ago
I wish this worked on Windows/Chrome, or I knew why it didn't work so I could star the issue on their bug tracker.
tmmm 12y ago
How does it work?
gojomo 12y ago
Interesting; the title displayed OK minutes ago, on the main page, in Firefox/OSX. But now it's showing as unsupported-glyph boxes inside the page... but still looks OK in the titlebar of the item (comments) page. Did some automated or administrative process mutate the characters? Or is this just Firefox drifting, in choice of font?
spindritf 12y ago
Also, strike-through. Which is the one I find genuinely useful because I like the suggestive way to say s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ then visibly correcting to something else. http://adamvarga.com/strike/ http://adamvarga.com/strike/
- endgame 12y ago
  People have written ^H and ^W since forever^W^Wfor a very long timg.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    Those are lost on many people nowadays. And strike through imho looks better.
Kiro 12y ago
Twitch chat will love this.
sthlm 12y ago
In Javascript, many unicode characters are allowed [0], so háćḱéŕŃéẃś is a valid variable name [1]. Note: The number of іllэБіъlэVаѓіаъlэИамэѕ [2] used in your production code is inversely proportional to the number of friends you'll make in the maintenance team. [0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers [1] https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%A9%C5%95%C5%83%C3%A9%E1%BA%83%C5%9B https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%... [2] http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegibleVariableNames http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegible...
- jarek 12y ago
  I had quite a lot of fun defining 汉字 variable names in C#. Though definitely not something to put into production code of course...
hesselink 12y ago
Strangely, for me on Firefox 33.1 on OS X, the title shows up fine on the main page. But when I click through to the comment, I get boxes only, and from then on, the main page also doesn't work anymore until I restart Firefox. I suspect an extension, but I'm not sure.
- hesselink 12y ago
  Found it, it was https://github.com/darrinhenein/VerticalTabs https://github.com/darrinhenein/VerticalTabs.
grimgrin 12y ago
My friend made a similar tool that you may enjoy: http://antglove.com/erger http://antglove.com/erger
- akavel 12y ago
  And seems to have more "proper fonts" than the originally linked one, actually.
huuu 12y ago
𝕯𝖔𝖊𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖐𝖓𝖔𝖜 𝖜𝖍𝖞 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖊 𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖘 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔 𝖍𝖎𝖌𝖍?
- scarygliders 12y ago
  𝕀'𝕞 𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕪 𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕒 𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕠𝕗 𝕣𝕖𝕡𝕝𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕣𝕖𝕝𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖-𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕥𝕖𝕩𝕥𝕤 𝕨𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕓𝕖𝕘𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕠 𝕘𝕖𝕥 𝕠𝕝𝕕 𝕢𝕦𝕚𝕔𝕜𝕝𝕪 ;)
  - solistice 12y ago
    Hey, we got this toy and we want to play with it. There's this great quote that anything that was fun when you were five is still fun when you're thirty five, and playing around with funky letters was certainly fun at the age of 5.
    - scarygliders 12y ago
      Oh I agree entirely - my post was meant for the irony rather than being a 45-year old curmudgeon ;) (And I had fun too!)
  - huuu 12y ago
    It was a serious question tho..
guardian5x 12y ago
I only saw boxes in the title with Chrome 38. Tried out IE10 and it works just fine.
- rplnt 12y ago
  Boxes with (Blink) Opera as well. Works in firefox.
  - guardian5x 12y ago
    I just noticed that in the Chrome tabs it shows the title correctly, i guess its because it just uses Windows unicode support there. But everywhere else its not showing.
- umurkontaci 12y ago
  Chrome 38 on MacOSX Yosemite. Works just fine both focused and unfocused.
TorKlingberg 12y ago
Does anyone know why there are separate Unicode code points for letters in bold, bold italic and Fraktur? Normally this sort of thing should be handled by different fonts / font variants. Is it for compatibility with some legacy encoding?
- rossy 12y ago
  They're mathematical symbols. I guess they're for situations where, say, a double-struck letter has a different meaning to the regular letter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...
lazyjones 12y ago
Great, now we'll have to rely on IDEs with clickable drop-down lists of variables and function names because simple text input just got a lot harder for languages where Unicode is allowed for symbols! http://play.golang.org/p/2zYfCx_J-O http://play.golang.org/p/2zYfCx_J-O
- 1010 12y ago
  Presumably, we are now in a situation where it is actually more difficult to learn computer programming if you happen to have had the misfortune to be born into a 'non-western' language and, to some extent, even non-english. That is an absurd situation and means that, as a collective species, we are wasting a huge amount of resources and potential. Definitely something we should look to resolve. Having a drop-down for variables certainly isn't a solution, granted. Hopefully, there are some more sensible compromises - e.g. being able to specify a locale-dependent subset of unicode in your personal environment, appropriate use of metadata to describe the language of a file, etc.
- recursive 12y ago
  Auto-complete is already in most decent editors and almost every IDE.
rplnt 12y ago
Does not really work for characters like úôä, not sure if there isn't anything similar in those "styles" or it was just ignored.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
This surprises me, what exactly is the point of encoding what are essentially different fonts in unicode? Isn't that the job of the presentation layer? (the Fraktur variant is awesome btw, and is apparently in the valid unicode range for Java...)
- masklinn 12y ago
  The graphical difference has semantic significance in some domains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...
  - Flimm 12y ago
    Indeed, this is technically a misuse of Unicode.
    - masklinn 12y ago
      It's unclear whether you're talking about the page or the unicode block. For the page, that's fairly obvious when you look at the pseudoalphabet converters.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      If you refer to those characters, no it's not. It's not just a different style for the same character, it has semantic meaning.
  - MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
    I guess that makes sense. Personally I find it annoying how mathematical notation seems so intractable today. Things that are easily understood in code for me are a mystery in math notation. But I guess there will never be an overhaul with a more intuitive typography...
    - RBerenguel 12y ago
      Keep in mind it is also true the other way around. Something can be mathematically clear to someone and totally a mystery in code form. Each one has his/her strengths and weaknesses.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
petercooper 12y ago
If you like this sort of thing, you might like this piece I wrote some time back about writing a Ruby script using whitespace for all identifiers: http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace-shenigans-for-rubyists-5980.html http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace...
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  This sounds like it could be abused. Someone submitting a path to an open-source program (in Ruby) with a NBSP somewhere that changes the program logic or something. (a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b, where earlier you did a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b=x, or something similar, is the first example that comes to mind.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    Whoops. Patch, not path.
edent 12y ago
This is the w̶o̶r̶s̶t̶ b̲e̲s̲t̲ use of Unicode!
shaurz 12y ago
What is the point of having different codepoints for FONTS in Unicode? What a load of nonsense.
- Arnt 12y ago
  Unicode generally includes these things because an older encoding did, in the name of roundtrip compability. I expect some older font encoding did it to cater to people who need more than 26 symbols in their maths papers. Let 𝒉 be the... Unicode's name for 𝒉 explains it all, really.
  - lmm 12y ago
    And yet the Unicode consortium went with Han unification, which is still blocking adoption for a significant potential userbase (pretty much any software that needs to display Japanese names).
    - anjbe 12y ago
      Well, the original reasoning behind Han unification was the (horrendously impractical) idea of storing all of Unicode in 16 bits. Most of these characters were added later; you can tell because their codepoints are greater than U+FFFF.
    - Arnt 12y ago
      I went to a unicode meeting about a decade ago, and asked one of the luminaries over beer one night. He told me that they did some practical research, including reading newspapers and talking to editors. In Japan they would ask questions like "I see that you mention Shanghai in today's paper, and you use Japanese glyphs for the city's name, not the same as Chinese newspaper use. Why?". The answer was generally "that's how we write Shanghai here" and out of that came Han unification. I suspect that if you could find a couple of mainstream publishers in Taiwan or Japan that prefer to print the names of mainland Chinese using the same glyphs as are used on mainland China instead of the glypths used on Taiwan or in Japan, you might be able to reopen the discussion of han unification.
Houshalter 12y ago
☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐
tezza 12y ago
🆃🅷🅴🆁🅴 🅶🅾🅴🆂 🆁🅴🅰🅳🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈, 🆂🅴🅰🆁🅲🅷🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈
- crb 12y ago
  Ctrl-F "there goes" found this comment just fine.
  - tezza 12y ago
    No dice on my system, in-page search does not work. Mac or Windows Firefox. Also some of the menu of glyphs are only visual analogues, not 1-1 replacements. Plenty of systems and indexers will not be sophisticated enough to cope. This may be very frustrating if you have visual impairments and need a screen reader.
    - vhost- 12y ago
      Same here on windows, mac and debian with firefox.
netheril96 12y ago
𝕿𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑𝖘 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖐 𝖇𝖚𝖙 𝕴 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖎𝖙. 𝕹𝖔𝖜 𝕴 𝖈𝖆𝖓 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝖔𝖋 𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖘𝖊 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖉𝖔𝖊𝖘𝖓'𝖙 𝖘𝖚𝖕𝖕𝖔𝖗𝖙 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Except when the site in question is completely broken wrt astral codepoints. Which is unexpectedly common as MySQL's "utf8" can't handle codepoints outside the BMP and will just truncate text at the first astral codepoint[0]. You need MySQL 5.5.3 (because adding a whole new encoding in a minor version makes perfect sense) and "utf8mb4" (because why would a codec called "utf8" actually do UTF8?). And then the regex are probably broken because it's PHP and developers use neither UNICODE mode nor properties (PCRE's "\w" will not match all unicode letters, you need "\p{L}" for that, also note that e.g. "🆄" is a symbol not a letter, although "𝔹" is a letter) [0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4 https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    MySQL is horrible for all the same reasons PHP is horrible, and this applies to Unicode too, except PHP is actually trying to fix its Unicode problems (UTF8 is the default now, moves towards adding a UString class), while MySQL isn't fixing them.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  Like 𝑻𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓! https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/535105548761309184 https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/535105548761309184
pud 12y ago
I made an iPhone app that does kind of the same thing, but converts letters to their upside-down unicode equivalent. It's fun for sending upside-down texts. Free and ad-free, just a fun project: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id435354073?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id4...
- tgcordell 12y ago
  Would it be possible to use the new third party keyboard API in iOS8 to have a regular styled keyboard that types in an upside down fashion? This would allow the user to continue having the same input experience, but translate the output experience? Once confirmed this is possible, you could take OP's idea and apply as well.
- thomasfl 12y ago
  Now you have an idea for how to extend it with funny fonts as well.
- drfuchs 12y ago
  On my vanilla iPhone 6, all it does is turn the whole screen white.
sakri 12y ago
fun for passwords
grayclhn 12y ago
I look forward to a Hacker News front page that looks like a ransom note.
- protomyth 12y ago
  I think of it as a karma backlash from Apple naming a new font San Fransisco for the iWatch instead of leaving the name for the old ransom font.
jfmercer 12y ago
I couldn't help but notice that this converter was copyrighted by Eli the Bearded. Google "Eli the Bearded", but not from work. You'll get some very interesting results. https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Eli%20the%20Bearded https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Eli%20the%20Bearded
hbbio 12y ago
Oh, no ! The cat should have stayed in a box, if this gains too much popularity, HN will read like MySpace back in the days. And top HN news will be: "A browser plugin that translates Unicode back to ASCII".
- shaunpud 12y ago
  𝓒𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓻𝔂 𝓫𝓻𝓸
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Expect subsequent uses of this to get flagkilled into oblivion.
- errnoh 12y ago
  The problem is that this doesn't stop here. This method works everywhere and it will spread. We'll need a plugin to reverse this, anyone up for it?
  - peterwwillis 12y ago
    Go to your browser's menu bar, click 'View', go to 'Character Encoding', and select 'Western (ISO-8859-1)'. Now it's just garbage characters. (It's not reversed, but at least it's not bold?)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- floatrock 12y ago
  I saw a thing recently where a unicode encoding trick was used in an oauth phishing scam -- using unicode characters, a scammer was able to make an oauth connector that looked like the real company but passed through the company's "if (oauthConnector.name.toLowercase().contains('our name')) { throw new DenyError();}" check. The user though the oauth app was legit because it was the "same" as the company name, accepted the connection, and promptly had their account emptied: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lt76n/warning_coinbase_oauth_phishing_attack_allows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lt76n/warning_coi... Now, it's up for debate whether any (psuedo?) financial institution should offer full oauth access (at least without having a human review possible oauth connectors), but the point is, decorative hackernews submissions are the least malicious use of this trick.
gus_massa 12y ago
This is similar to the pseudolocalization (þšéûðöļöçåļîžåţîöñ), that adds random accents to English word to test the localization capabilities of a program without requiring another language knowledge. An online version: http://www.pseudolocalize.com/ http://www.pseudolocalize.com/ A library: http://code.google.com/p/pseudolocalization-tool/ http://code.google.com/p/pseudolocalization-tool/
fiatjaf 12y ago
.ǝɔıu ɹǝdns sɐʍ sıɥʇ
yAnonymous 12y ago
𝓘 𝔀𝓸𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻 𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝔀𝓮𝓵𝓵 𝓝𝓢𝓐 𝓓𝓟𝓘 𝓼𝔂𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓶𝓼 𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼.
kalops 12y ago
teh cancer that is HN. predicting next post someone shows off rageflipping text
geekam 12y ago
This fails to show up on my iPhone 5S Safari and I thought it supported Unicode.
DanBC 12y ago
Chrome on iOS is giving me the character unavailable boxes. Normally I'd just change the font but I can't do that here. This doesn't feel like the future.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
calineczka 12y ago
Finally a way to express myself on facebook properly ;) I wonder if bold text would lead to better conversion from ads using this trick. And I wonder when is facebook going to ban this because obviously it works :)
PSeitz 12y ago
𝓚𝓐𝓦𝓐𝓘
cturner 12y ago
Different problem, but someone who knows about unicode will probably know this - When I paste from microsoft documents into putty, characters will often be transformed to weird versions. Example - emdash is a different character to '-'. It comes through as a weird tilda character instead of a dash. Mmm. Frustating. Is there a robust program you can run on putty to catch such type and flatten it to ascii?
- benjaminjackman 12y ago
  I use Linux but there are similar problems, I usually will paste text like that into sublime to remove all the special formatting, then re-copy paste it. I also found this stack overflow post, which mentions a program (puretext) that maps win+v to do a text only paste: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122404/how-to-copy-and-paste-code-without-rich-text-formatting http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122404/how-to-copy-and-pa...
- Siecje 12y ago
  Does Ctrl+Shift+v (paste without formatting) work?
cm2012 12y ago
On my android all the unicode characters (including the title) are blank.
jrometty 12y ago
It should be mentioned that this returns a blank title on the android app.
gpvos 12y ago
I do feel that Unicode is slowly jumping the shark.
dsjoerg 12y ago
ᴅᴏᴇꜱ ᴀɴyᴏɴᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪꜰ ᴩᴏᴩᴜʟᴀʀ ꜱᴇᴀʀᴄʜ ᴇɴɢɪɴᴇꜱ ᴅᴇ-ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ ᴡʜᴇɴ ɪɴᴅᴇxɪɴɢ?
- guipsp 12y ago
  Google does, atleast for fullwidth.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Which makes sense, as fullwidth is likely to be accidentally typed when using a Chinese/Japanese/Korean IME, and is entirely equivalent to normal characters, it just fits in with CJK text layouts better.
- phpnode 12y ago
  they definitely don't. Search for "ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ" and you'll see the only matches are exactly that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  They usually don't, because the text isn't supposed to be equivalent to "non-'Unicode'" text.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
parasj 12y ago
𝓖𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓹𝓪𝓼𝓼𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓼
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
JulianMorrison 12y ago
𝕸𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝕷𝖚𝖋𝖙𝖐𝖎𝖘𝖘𝖊𝖓𝖋𝖆𝖍𝖗𝖟𝖊𝖚𝖌 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖛𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖗 𝕬𝖆𝖑𝖊.
arikrak 12y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383672 though they changed my title to normal text.
edgarallenbro 12y ago
This is great, but why is the Australian translation called 'upside down pseudoalphabet'?
Immortalin 12y ago
On iOS 8.1 safari all I see is a bunch of squares ;(
ck2 12y ago
Note that XP cannot show Negative Circled Squared Negative Squared Double-struck Bold Bold italic Bold script Fraktur At least not with the fonts I have.
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Firefox on my Ubuntu 14.04 PC cannot show: Negative Circled Squared Negative Squared
codemonkeymike 12y ago
Continued use of this would be a good way of making me not use HN.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
I don't really speak/read Russian, but I have a passable understanding of Cyrillic, and those always look dumb. It doesn't look like "the" to be, it looks lik "guh-buh-yeh" or something. Same thing with the Borat DVD cover.
- dang 12y ago
  Or Toys Ya Us.
getdavidhiggins 12y ago
https://www.unicod.es/ https://www.unicod.es/
getdavidhiggins 12y ago
ｔｈｉѕ ｉѕ ｇｒéäｔ, ƅüｔ ìｔ'ｓｃｌ߀ｓèԁ ｓòùｒｃè!!! üｎíｔｏ߀ɭｓ ìѕ ϻùｃհ ƃｅｔｔëｒ!! https://www.unicod.es/ https://www.unicod.es/
aruggirello 12y ago
!ꙅᴙɘTliꟻ mAqꙅ ꟻo Tɘꙅ wɘᴎ ɘloHw A ꙅbɘɘᴎ ꙅiHT ,oᴎ HO
sovok 12y ago
Very cool. Although the upside-down text doesn't work with ümlauts and numbers. A reverse function would also be nice. I wrote a similar tool that does this (http://lunicode.com http://lunicode.com). It's on Github if you want to use the code: https://github.com/combatwombat/Lunicode.js https://github.com/combatwombat/Lunicode.js
cgranier 12y ago
What I need is something that takes all the extended characters (think Spanish or Swedish) and turns them into alternative safe versions. For instance, á into a, ñ into n, å into a, etc. Had my hopes up when I saw the title. Does anyone have any ideas or links to working scripts that I can turn into something useful? I need to "sanitize" a database of foreign documentaries before uploading to YouTube (their metadata input system chokes on extended chars). Thanks!
- cataphract 12y ago
  You can use ICU transliterators. Example for the PHP ICU bindings: http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php#111939 http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php#11...
  - cgranier 12y ago
    Thanks. This looks very promising. I'll dig into it and hopefully come out with a clean database ;-)
- driax 12y ago
  When you say safe alternatives, you mean ASCII right. You should think about looking into something which also understand the characters a bit better. For example å,æ,ø can mostly be turned into aa,ae,oe for danish and norwegian. Just turning them into a,?,o would change the meaning.
  - cgranier 12y ago
    Exactly. I need to turn them into something meaningful.
    - Pxtl 12y ago
      Well, there are two separate problems. First is phonetic similarity. This is mostly just to allow users to be able to understand each other and to help automatically catch alternate latinizations so you find out "Hey, he already registered under a latinized-spelling name". The second is glyph similarity. This is the security concern where you have two glyphs that are graphically similar but phonetically completely different, but can easily be mistaken for each other. These glyphs are used to trick and confuse users. The first kind of check won't catch these, but they're the reason we don't have unicode in domain names. Probably a correct system would have a very liberal interpretation of glyph similarity and would treat strings as matched when they contain similar glyphs.
tibbon 12y ago
It appears to work on Facebook and Twitter. ｉｎｃｅｐｔｉｏｎ
mxfh 12y ago
Since it wasn't mentioned here earlier, it's worth to take a look at shapecatcher to see what glyphs might resemble latin letters. Scribbling something resembling the latin capital letter A returns for example any of these codepoints: A𝘈ΑАÅ𝖠∆ДΔ𝐴𝟺дᎪߡ𝛢Å4𝛥ᴬᐃⵠ𐌀𝘼𝛬Λ△𝟦Ą𝜟𝓐⌓⧍ᗋ🜂Ⲇ🗻🍙ⲇѦᗩᗅ http://shapecatcher.com/ http://shapecatcher.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107) Also the Unicode Consortium has some reports on security: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ listing all kind of spoofing methods you haven even thought of.
Flott 12y ago
This is not good news if it bypasses the spam filters! Does it?
jackmaney 12y ago
I'd like to buy a vowel, please. Let's go with "e".
edem 12y ago
Can you do z̝̗a͈̣̳͓l͏g̱̭͖̜̙o̢̦̫̯ as well?
seqizz 12y ago
I feel nice.. http://i.imgur.com/lbvRWwm.png http://i.imgur.com/lbvRWwm.png
qeorge 12y ago
I was once bilked into buying some scraped content as original work by this method. It passed copyscape, and my test of Googling a a random sentence in quotes didn't bring anything up. I let it go because I had already accepted the work, and the lesson was worth more than the article anyway. Don't be fool as I was! Had I manually transcribed a sentence into Google instead of copying + pasting the Unicode chars, I would have found hundreds of copies of the same article.
seba_dos1 12y ago
𝕴 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑 𝖆 𝖓𝖊𝖜 𝖛𝖎𝖗𝖆𝖑 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖘𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝖒𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖌.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  This has been a ⓣⓗⓘⓝⓖ [thing] for quite some time - guess it might be making a come back, I've seen zalgo (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zalgo http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zalgo NSFW; ̖͈̪͙͉̰͈Z͓͎̬͓̯̖A̶̯̝̖͍̥̞L̻G̢̣̘͇̖͍̙O [Zalgo] generator http://www.eeemo.net/ http://www.eeemo.net/) and flip and reverse text live on my Facebook in the past at least.
GregBuchholz 12y ago
⎧1 if n = 0; F(n) ≡ ⎨1 if n = 1; ⎩F(n-1) + F(n-2) if n > 1. ⎛ ∇∙D⃑ = ρ ⎞ ⎜ ∇∙B⃑ = 0 ⎟ ⎜ ∇×E⃑ = -∂B⃑/∂t ⎟ ⎝ ∇×H⃑ = J⃑ + ∂D⃑/∂t ⎠ ⌠¹ π = 2⎮ √1̅̅-̅̅x̅̅²̅̅ dx ⌡₋₁ ⎡1 0 1⎤ ⎡î⎤ ⎢0 1 0⎥ ⎢ĵ⎥ ⎣1 0 1⎦ ⎣k̂⎦ Γ ⊢ t:S S<:T ――――――――――――――― (T-Sub) Γ ⊢ t:T ⎛ 1 ⎞ⁿ ℯ = lim ⎜1+ ― ⎟ ⁿ→∞ ⎝ n ⎠
- lisper 12y ago
  That's pretty slick. Did you do that manually?
  - GregBuchholz 12y ago
    ╔════════════════════╗ ║ Yes. All manually ║ ╙────────────────────╜
  - GregBuchholz 12y ago
    Common lisp reader macros anyone? ⎛if ⎛> (+ a b)⎞ ⎛case x ⎞ ⎛cond ⎞⎞ ⎜ ⎝ (- c d)⎠ ⎜ (1 'foo)⎟ ⎜ ((> y 2) 'quux) ⎟⎟ ⎜ ⎜ (2 'bar)⎟ ⎝ (t 'error)⎠⎟ ⎝ ⎝ (3 'baz)⎠ ⎠ ...(hmmm. For some reason that looks better in my editor than on the webpage. Apparently a fixed width font isn't necessarily fixed when it comes to unicode). http://imgur.com/oI0zVm3 http://imgur.com/oI0zVm3
- cousin_it 12y ago
  Nice! That's like ASCII art but with more characters, like U+2320 TOP HALF INTEGRAL, U+23A8 LEFT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE, etc.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Great multiline stuff. Could be improved by using the actual U+2212 minus sign −, not - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) when getting super pedantic. Did something like this last week making extensive use of unicode block 1D400 and different space widths. http://math.typeit.org/ http://math.typeit.org/ helped as well. 𝑟₁ 𝑣 𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉 𝛼 ↓ ↓ 𝜔 𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉 𝑟₂ 𝑣 https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/532575085337792512 https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/532575085337792512 formula is from http://algebraicvis.net/ http://algebraicvis.net/
vjvj 12y ago
🆃🅷🅴 🆂🅴🅲🆁🅴🆃 🅸🆂 🅾🆄🆃.
petecooper 12y ago
My iOS/Safari shows squares in the page itself, but a row of boxed aliens in the `Bookmarks and History` list: http://imgur.com/l98p9oN http://imgur.com/l98p9oN (image is safe for work, though other stuff on imgur.com is likely not)
ryanjmo 12y ago
เ ђคשє Շ๏ Շгץ Շђเร ๏ยՇ.
darkstalker 12y ago
I've used this page for a long time. Ｗｒｉｔｉｎｇｓｔｕｆｆｉｎｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈｕｎｉｃｏｄｅｆｏｒｓｕｒｅｍａｋｅｓｉｔｌｏｏｋｍｏｒｅｆｕｎｎｙ

908 points by sysk 12y ago

anjbe 12y ago

I’ve never been a fan of this sort of thing. The Unicode characters in these font blocks are not letters for making words; at least the double‐struck, fraktur, bold, italic, and bold italics are semantically for use in mathematical equations. This can have some strange effects if you try to use them like letters. Example: What’s the lowercase transform of 𝑼? 𝑼! Not 𝒖.

sjwright 12y ago

The question I have is, what's the easiest way to strip this 🅹🆄🅽🅺 out of unicode strings submitted by web users? With a nod to Cunningham's Law, surely the right answer is a regular expression?

atlbeer 12y ago
Depends on the language... but, the "correct" answer is support unicode and welcome yourself into a world of pain.
- dsjoerg 12y ago
  Glad you put "correct" in scare quotes, because that "correct" answer is certainly not correct.
NaNaN 12y ago
You can use “Adobe Blank”[1] and CSS @font-face{unicode-range:} to hide them. [1]: https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  So now the text won't show up at all? Wonderful :/

noobermin 12y ago

Ｑｕｉｔｅａｗａｙｔｏｍａｋｅｔｈｅｐｏｉｎｔ．

Systemic33 12y ago

Well that definitely takes the 𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕫𝕖 for most noticeable Hacker News submission. Suggestion (if you are author): There are a lot of chars that look like another char, often used on the web, so i think that there are more advanced versions to be made. I think i read that a lot of thai signs and cyrillic look like latin chars.

samuellevy 12y ago
Yeah, it's great fun to put a cyrillic "а" into a variable name in code.
- Systemic33 12y ago
  Oh it can get much much worse... have a look at greek questionmark: "[...] canonically decomposes to U+003B ; semicolon making the marks identical in practice." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_mark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Greek_question_ma...
  - nl 12y ago
    Oh that is awesome! I wonder if Java uses it as a semi-colon too?
    - Systemic33 12y ago
      I have only tested it with javescript, which gave a syntax error.
- solistice 12y ago
  or having your variable names in _𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗 which might be more appearent but none the less annoying. That'd make a nice useless language though. 𝖕𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖎𝖈 𝖛𝖔𝖎𝖉[] 𝖒𝖆𝖎𝖓(𝖘𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌[] 𝖆𝖗𝖌𝖘) { 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖘𝖔𝖑𝖊.𝖂𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖊𝕷𝖎𝖓𝖊("𝕳𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔 𝖂𝖊𝖑𝖙"); } // 𝕽𝖊𝖈𝖍𝖊𝖓𝖒𝖆𝖘𝖈𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖓𝖘𝖕𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖍𝖊 "𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗" 𝕰𝖎𝖓𝖘 𝕻𝖚𝖓𝖐𝖙 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑 𝕹𝖚𝖑𝖑

robjh 12y ago

For others without that specific font or what have you: "Unicode Text Converter" On my windows box with chrome all i see are empty boxes.

TheAnimus 12y ago
Use IE (wow, don't say that often) it has much better typography support, if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful.
- rossy 12y ago
  > if you are on a high DPI display, chrome just looks awful I'm fairly sure this is no longer the case. Chrome is high-DPI aware on Windows now, and it uses DirectWrite for font rendering, the same as IE. It just can't display these characters for some reason.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    I think he does not only mean the font rendering, but the UI itself. Anyway, DirectWrite was horrible at high DPI, if I remember correctly.
    - rossy 12y ago
      Nope, the UI got an update too. It renders at high-DPI on Windows. Chrome on a high-DPI machine looks exactly the same as on a low-DPI machine, except sharper. It used to be plagued with issues, but I'm fairly sure they're all gone now. DirectWrite isn't perfect. It still has weird hinting and kerning at high-DPI with some fonts, but it's better than GDI. I find Chrome better than IE, actually. IE ignores my DPI settings and scales pages to 250%, so everything looks too large. Chrome renders correctly at 200%.
- robjh 12y ago
  That's interesting. These comments make a lot more sense in IE11. 𝒃𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒕 𝒆𝒙𝒑𝒍𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒓 11 This reminds me of the 1990s. haha

hliyan 12y ago

Impressive! Hopefully, this won't end with HN sanitizing everything except latin + latin extended from submissions.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Well it does / should make people rethink allowing UTF-8 by default in user-generated content. I wonder if the stuff generated by http://www.eeemo.net/ http://www.eeemo.net/ works here: Z̡̖̥̙̱͓A̶͚̬̺L̷͖͓Ģ͕O̳̮!̗
- rikkus 12y ago
  Nice utility. What should I tag it with in my bookmarks though?
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    ̶He҉ who Wa̧i̴t̢s ̴Beh͟in͠d̢ T͢h́e W͡all͏.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  #فͤ҈ͨͥ҉҉ͦ҈҉ͨ҈ͩ҉ͪ҈ͣͯͫ҉ͥͬͨ҈ͭ҉ͮ҈ͯ҉ͨ҈ͭͭͬ҉ͧͥ҈ͣ҉ͨ҉҉҈ͧͥ҉ͯ҈ͮͥ҉ͭ҈ͤ҈ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҈ͩͯ҉ͭ҈ͨ҉ͨͥ҉҉ͣ҉ͣͪ҉ͧ҈ͭ҉ͩ҈ͤ҉ͮ҈ͯͥ҈ͬ҈ͭ҈ͦ҈ͨͣ҉ͥ҈ͯ҉҉ͣͧ҈ͫ҉ͭ҈ͥͯͯ҉ͦ҈ͥ҉ͧ҉҈ͩ҉ͭ҈ͣͨ҉ͣͥ҈ͪ҉ͧ҈ͭᅠ'̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ ᅠᅠ'̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋̋ กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็ก้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้้ก็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็กิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิิ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͣͤͥͦͧ ͤͥͦͧͣ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ͧͣͤͥͦ ͥͦͧͣͤ ͦͧͣͤͥ ▲▲▲̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏̏ Works for me.
  - spyder 12y ago
    This comment has a strange behavior in Firefox, which is not surprising but it's probably a bug: When I scrolling to this comment there is no characters outside of the comment box but when i switch back to this page from another tab then the characters are going outside the comment box.

tempodox 12y ago

It works :) 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒓 comes in a fancy bold italic font in my HN list. I love this hack.

eterm 12y ago
Oddly in Firefox the tab name showing the title only gets as far as 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐 before giving up with what looks like a box with D835 in it.
- acqq 12y ago
  The tab name is shortened in the middle of the sequence. I still don't know what the sequence is though, any Unicode expert to explain? Apparently is d835 "invalid"? http://www.charbase.com/d835-unicode-invalid-character http://www.charbase.com/d835-unicode-invalid-character Edit: I see now emillon explains: "U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f." That's: http://codepoints.net/U+1D48F http://codepoints.net/U+1D48F "MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL N"
- razzmataz 12y ago
  I get 𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...

sanxiyn 12y ago

https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/533848879423578112 https://twitter.com/benbjohnson/status/533848879423578112

gojomo 12y ago

Hey! I was just thinking about this site, and visited it for the first time in years, after mentioning the old San Francisco ransom-font in another thread. By randomly mixing these Unicode letter and letterlike characters, you can simulate a cut-and-paste ransom-note. For example, an acquired company could announce changes to its privacy policy: wE ℎåve yøuR ρrIvᴀçy ⅈn a ᴡiNdøwleSs ℞oøm, & ℙℓaℕ τø ⅆo µnSρεaKᴀble †hiℕℊs t○ ⅈt

hanula 12y ago
Heh, I created something like that in Python: https://github.com/hanula/weirdify https://github.com/hanula/weirdify while playing with unicodedata module.

horse_continuum 12y ago

One of my friends, moving to China for a semester to teach, was thinking of using a proper Chinese name to make it easier for students to address him. He had a good idea, even, which he shared on Facebook. I proposed that we should name him after the lack of unicode support in our browsers, and we ended up calling him "Box Boxbox" for a couple of months.

kcorbitt 12y ago

Just a PSA for discoverability: since the replacement characters use different code points than their more standard equivalents, the default HN search (https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com) at least doesn't find this submission when searching for "unicode."

emillon 12y ago

Funny how it triggered a bug in Firefox. When the tab is unfocused, its title in the handle is "𝑼𝒏…", but when it gets the focus it becomes "𝑼<D835>…" (in a square box). The next codepoint is U+1D48F whose UTF-16 BE encoding is d8 35 dc 8f. I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes and that it can't make sense of d8 35, but I'm not too sure how to fix that since graphemes can have arbitrary length (right?). Do you have to compute the width in advance?

jabiko 12y ago
It seems like this is a known bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921528 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921528
anon1385 12y ago
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ There are libraries for doing it in Javascript: https://www.npmjs.org/package/grapheme-breaker https://www.npmjs.org/package/grapheme-breaker (is that part of the Firefox UI done in Javascript? I've no idea)
pwnna 12y ago
Hm.. i'm on nightly and seems to be unaffected by this problem.
- emillon 12y ago
  It depends on the size of the tab headers.
pc86 12y ago
I am using FF Dev Edition and see "Unico<D835>..." regardless of focus. Weird.
aninhumer 12y ago
>I'd say that the truncation algorithm operates on bytes This seems likely, as another notable weirdness is that even with full width tabs, where there's plenty of space for at least "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐𝒅𝒆 𝑻𝒆𝒙𝒕..." it still only shows "𝑼𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒐...".

rossy 12y ago

I wish this worked on Windows/Chrome, or I knew why it didn't work so I could star the issue on their bug tracker.

tmmm 12y ago

How does it work?

gojomo 12y ago

Interesting; the title displayed OK minutes ago, on the main page, in Firefox/OSX. But now it's showing as unsupported-glyph boxes inside the page... but still looks OK in the titlebar of the item (comments) page. Did some automated or administrative process mutate the characters? Or is this just Firefox drifting, in choice of font?

spindritf 12y ago

Also, strike-through. Which is the one I find genuinely useful because I like the suggestive way to say s̶o̶m̶e̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ then visibly correcting to something else. http://adamvarga.com/strike/ http://adamvarga.com/strike/

endgame 12y ago
People have written ^H and ^W since forever^W^Wfor a very long timg.
- spindritf 12y ago
  Those are lost on many people nowadays. And strike through imho looks better.

Kiro 12y ago

Twitch chat will love this.

sthlm 12y ago

In Javascript, many unicode characters are allowed [0], so háćḱéŕŃéẃś is a valid variable name [1]. Note: The number of іllэБіъlэVаѓіаъlэИамэѕ [2] used in your production code is inversely proportional to the number of friends you'll make in the maintenance team. [0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers [1] https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%A9%C5%95%C5%83%C3%A9%E1%BA%83%C5%9B https://mothereff.in/js-variables#h%C3%A1%C4%87%E1%B8%B1%C3%... [2] http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegibleVariableNames http://www.panix.com/~eli/unicode/convert.cgi?text=illegible...

jarek 12y ago
I had quite a lot of fun defining 汉字 variable names in C#. Though definitely not something to put into production code of course...

hesselink 12y ago

Strangely, for me on Firefox 33.1 on OS X, the title shows up fine on the main page. But when I click through to the comment, I get boxes only, and from then on, the main page also doesn't work anymore until I restart Firefox. I suspect an extension, but I'm not sure.

hesselink 12y ago
Found it, it was https://github.com/darrinhenein/VerticalTabs https://github.com/darrinhenein/VerticalTabs.

grimgrin 12y ago

My friend made a similar tool that you may enjoy: http://antglove.com/erger http://antglove.com/erger

akavel 12y ago
And seems to have more "proper fonts" than the originally linked one, actually.

huuu 12y ago

𝕯𝖔𝖊𝖘 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖐𝖓𝖔𝖜 𝖜𝖍𝖞 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖊 𝖍𝖊𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖔𝖋 𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖘𝖊 𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖗𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖘 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔 𝖍𝖎𝖌𝖍?

scarygliders 12y ago
𝕀'𝕞 𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕪 𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕒 𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕕 𝕠𝕗 𝕣𝕖𝕡𝕝𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕣𝕖𝕝𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖-𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕥𝕖𝕩𝕥𝕤 𝕨𝕚𝕝𝕝 𝕓𝕖𝕘𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕠 𝕘𝕖𝕥 𝕠𝕝𝕕 𝕢𝕦𝕚𝕔𝕜𝕝𝕪 ;)
- solistice 12y ago
  Hey, we got this toy and we want to play with it. There's this great quote that anything that was fun when you were five is still fun when you're thirty five, and playing around with funky letters was certainly fun at the age of 5.
  - scarygliders 12y ago
    Oh I agree entirely - my post was meant for the irony rather than being a 45-year old curmudgeon ;) (And I had fun too!)
- huuu 12y ago
  It was a serious question tho..

guardian5x 12y ago

I only saw boxes in the title with Chrome 38. Tried out IE10 and it works just fine.

rplnt 12y ago
Boxes with (Blink) Opera as well. Works in firefox.
- guardian5x 12y ago
  I just noticed that in the Chrome tabs it shows the title correctly, i guess its because it just uses Windows unicode support there. But everywhere else its not showing.
umurkontaci 12y ago
Chrome 38 on MacOSX Yosemite. Works just fine both focused and unfocused.

TorKlingberg 12y ago

Does anyone know why there are separate Unicode code points for letters in bold, bold italic and Fraktur? Normally this sort of thing should be handled by different fonts / font variants. Is it for compatibility with some legacy encoding?

rossy 12y ago
They're mathematical symbols. I guess they're for situations where, say, a double-struck letter has a different meaning to the regular letter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...

lazyjones 12y ago

Great, now we'll have to rely on IDEs with clickable drop-down lists of variables and function names because simple text input just got a lot harder for languages where Unicode is allowed for symbols! http://play.golang.org/p/2zYfCx_J-O http://play.golang.org/p/2zYfCx_J-O

1010 12y ago
Presumably, we are now in a situation where it is actually more difficult to learn computer programming if you happen to have had the misfortune to be born into a 'non-western' language and, to some extent, even non-english. That is an absurd situation and means that, as a collective species, we are wasting a huge amount of resources and potential. Definitely something we should look to resolve. Having a drop-down for variables certainly isn't a solution, granted. Hopefully, there are some more sensible compromises - e.g. being able to specify a locale-dependent subset of unicode in your personal environment, appropriate use of metadata to describe the language of a file, etc.
recursive 12y ago
Auto-complete is already in most decent editors and almost every IDE.

rplnt 12y ago

Does not really work for characters like úôä, not sure if there isn't anything similar in those "styles" or it was just ignored.

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

This surprises me, what exactly is the point of encoding what are essentially different fonts in unicode? Isn't that the job of the presentation layer? (the Fraktur variant is awesome btw, and is apparently in the valid unicode range for Java...)

masklinn 12y ago
The graphical difference has semantic significance in some domains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Alphanumeric_Symbo...
- Flimm 12y ago
  Indeed, this is technically a misuse of Unicode.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    It's unclear whether you're talking about the page or the unicode block. For the page, that's fairly obvious when you look at the pseudoalphabet converters.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    If you refer to those characters, no it's not. It's not just a different style for the same character, it has semantic meaning.
- MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  I guess that makes sense. Personally I find it annoying how mathematical notation seems so intractable today. Things that are easily understood in code for me are a mystery in math notation. But I guess there will never be an overhaul with a more intuitive typography...
  - RBerenguel 12y ago
    Keep in mind it is also true the other way around. Something can be mathematically clear to someone and totally a mystery in code form. Each one has his/her strengths and weaknesses.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

petercooper 12y ago

If you like this sort of thing, you might like this piece I wrote some time back about writing a Ruby script using whitespace for all identifiers: http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace-shenigans-for-rubyists-5980.html http://www.rubyinside.com/the-split-is-not-enough-whitespace...

TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
This sounds like it could be abused. Someone submitting a path to an open-source program (in Ruby) with a NBSP somewhere that changes the program logic or something. (a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b, where earlier you did a<NBSP>or<NBSP>b=x, or something similar, is the first example that comes to mind.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  Whoops. Patch, not path.

edent 12y ago

This is the w̶o̶r̶s̶t̶ b̲e̲s̲t̲ use of Unicode!

shaurz 12y ago

What is the point of having different codepoints for FONTS in Unicode? What a load of nonsense.

Arnt 12y ago
Unicode generally includes these things because an older encoding did, in the name of roundtrip compability. I expect some older font encoding did it to cater to people who need more than 26 symbols in their maths papers. Let 𝒉 be the... Unicode's name for 𝒉 explains it all, really.
- lmm 12y ago
  And yet the Unicode consortium went with Han unification, which is still blocking adoption for a significant potential userbase (pretty much any software that needs to display Japanese names).
  - anjbe 12y ago
    Well, the original reasoning behind Han unification was the (horrendously impractical) idea of storing all of Unicode in 16 bits. Most of these characters were added later; you can tell because their codepoints are greater than U+FFFF.
  - Arnt 12y ago
    I went to a unicode meeting about a decade ago, and asked one of the luminaries over beer one night. He told me that they did some practical research, including reading newspapers and talking to editors. In Japan they would ask questions like "I see that you mention Shanghai in today's paper, and you use Japanese glyphs for the city's name, not the same as Chinese newspaper use. Why?". The answer was generally "that's how we write Shanghai here" and out of that came Han unification. I suspect that if you could find a couple of mainstream publishers in Taiwan or Japan that prefer to print the names of mainland Chinese using the same glyphs as are used on mainland China instead of the glypths used on Taiwan or in Japan, you might be able to reopen the discussion of han unification.

Houshalter 12y ago

☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐ ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐

tezza 12y ago

🆃🅷🅴🆁🅴 🅶🅾🅴🆂 🆁🅴🅰🅳🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈, 🆂🅴🅰🆁🅲🅷🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🆈

crb 12y ago
Ctrl-F "there goes" found this comment just fine.
- tezza 12y ago
  No dice on my system, in-page search does not work. Mac or Windows Firefox. Also some of the menu of glyphs are only visual analogues, not 1-1 replacements. Plenty of systems and indexers will not be sophisticated enough to cope. This may be very frustrating if you have visual impairments and need a screen reader.
  - vhost- 12y ago
    Same here on windows, mac and debian with firefox.

netheril96 12y ago

𝕿𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑𝖘 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖈𝖐 𝖇𝖚𝖙 𝕴 𝖑𝖎𝖐𝖊 𝖎𝖙. 𝕹𝖔𝖜 𝕴 𝖈𝖆𝖓 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝖔𝖋 𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖘𝖊 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖉𝖔𝖊𝖘𝖓'𝖙 𝖘𝖚𝖕𝖕𝖔𝖗𝖙 𝖋𝖔𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌.

masklinn 12y ago
Except when the site in question is completely broken wrt astral codepoints. Which is unexpectedly common as MySQL's "utf8" can't handle codepoints outside the BMP and will just truncate text at the first astral codepoint[0]. You need MySQL 5.5.3 (because adding a whole new encoding in a minor version makes perfect sense) and "utf8mb4" (because why would a codec called "utf8" actually do UTF8?). And then the regex are probably broken because it's PHP and developers use neither UNICODE mode nor properties (PCRE's "\w" will not match all unicode letters, you need "\p{L}" for that, also note that e.g. "🆄" is a symbol not a letter, although "𝔹" is a letter) [0] https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4 https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  MySQL is horrible for all the same reasons PHP is horrible, and this applies to Unicode too, except PHP is actually trying to fix its Unicode problems (UTF8 is the default now, moves towards adding a UString class), while MySQL isn't fixing them.
egypturnash 12y ago
Like 𝑻𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓! https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/535105548761309184 https://twitter.com/egypturnash/status/535105548761309184

pud 12y ago

I made an iPhone app that does kind of the same thing, but converts letters to their upside-down unicode equivalent. It's fun for sending upside-down texts. Free and ad-free, just a fun project: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id435354073?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/texting-upside-down-free/id4...

tgcordell 12y ago
Would it be possible to use the new third party keyboard API in iOS8 to have a regular styled keyboard that types in an upside down fashion? This would allow the user to continue having the same input experience, but translate the output experience? Once confirmed this is possible, you could take OP's idea and apply as well.
thomasfl 12y ago
Now you have an idea for how to extend it with funny fonts as well.
drfuchs 12y ago
On my vanilla iPhone 6, all it does is turn the whole screen white.

sakri 12y ago

fun for passwords

grayclhn 12y ago

I look forward to a Hacker News front page that looks like a ransom note.

protomyth 12y ago
I think of it as a karma backlash from Apple naming a new font San Fransisco for the iWatch instead of leaving the name for the old ransom font.

jfmercer 12y ago

I couldn't help but notice that this converter was copyrighted by Eli the Bearded. Google "Eli the Bearded", but not from work. You'll get some very interesting results. https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Eli%20the%20Bearded https://encrypted.google.com/#q=Eli%20the%20Bearded

hbbio 12y ago

Oh, no ! The cat should have stayed in a box, if this gains too much popularity, HN will read like MySpace back in the days. And top HN news will be: "A browser plugin that translates Unicode back to ASCII".

shaunpud 12y ago
𝓒𝓸𝓸𝓵 𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓻𝔂 𝓫𝓻𝓸
ceejayoz 12y ago
Expect subsequent uses of this to get flagkilled into oblivion.
errnoh 12y ago
The problem is that this doesn't stop here. This method works everywhere and it will spread. We'll need a plugin to reverse this, anyone up for it?
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  Go to your browser's menu bar, click 'View', go to 'Character Encoding', and select 'Western (ISO-8859-1)'. Now it's just garbage characters. (It's not reversed, but at least it's not bold?)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
floatrock 12y ago
I saw a thing recently where a unicode encoding trick was used in an oauth phishing scam -- using unicode characters, a scammer was able to make an oauth connector that looked like the real company but passed through the company's "if (oauthConnector.name.toLowercase().contains('our name')) { throw new DenyError();}" check. The user though the oauth app was legit because it was the "same" as the company name, accepted the connection, and promptly had their account emptied: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lt76n/warning_coinbase_oauth_phishing_attack_allows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lt76n/warning_coi... Now, it's up for debate whether any (psuedo?) financial institution should offer full oauth access (at least without having a human review possible oauth connectors), but the point is, decorative hackernews submissions are the least malicious use of this trick.

gus_massa 12y ago

This is similar to the pseudolocalization (þšéûðöļöçåļîžåţîöñ), that adds random accents to English word to test the localization capabilities of a program without requiring another language knowledge. An online version: http://www.pseudolocalize.com/ http://www.pseudolocalize.com/ A library: http://code.google.com/p/pseudolocalization-tool/ http://code.google.com/p/pseudolocalization-tool/

fiatjaf 12y ago

.ǝɔıu ɹǝdns sɐʍ sıɥʇ

yAnonymous 12y ago

𝓘 𝔀𝓸𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻 𝓱𝓸𝔀 𝔀𝓮𝓵𝓵 𝓝𝓢𝓐 𝓓𝓟𝓘 𝓼𝔂𝓼𝓽𝓮𝓶𝓼 𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓵𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓼.

kalops 12y ago

teh cancer that is HN. predicting next post someone shows off rageflipping text

geekam 12y ago

This fails to show up on my iPhone 5S Safari and I thought it supported Unicode.

DanBC 12y ago

Chrome on iOS is giving me the character unavailable boxes. Normally I'd just change the font but I can't do that here. This doesn't feel like the future.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

calineczka 12y ago

Finally a way to express myself on facebook properly ;) I wonder if bold text would lead to better conversion from ads using this trick. And I wonder when is facebook going to ban this because obviously it works :)

PSeitz 12y ago

𝓚𝓐𝓦𝓐𝓘

cturner 12y ago

Different problem, but someone who knows about unicode will probably know this - When I paste from microsoft documents into putty, characters will often be transformed to weird versions. Example - emdash is a different character to '-'. It comes through as a weird tilda character instead of a dash. Mmm. Frustating. Is there a robust program you can run on putty to catch such type and flatten it to ascii?

benjaminjackman 12y ago
I use Linux but there are similar problems, I usually will paste text like that into sublime to remove all the special formatting, then re-copy paste it. I also found this stack overflow post, which mentions a program (puretext) that maps win+v to do a text only paste: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122404/how-to-copy-and-paste-code-without-rich-text-formatting http://stackoverflow.com/questions/122404/how-to-copy-and-pa...
Siecje 12y ago
Does Ctrl+Shift+v (paste without formatting) work?

cm2012 12y ago

On my android all the unicode characters (including the title) are blank.

jrometty 12y ago

It should be mentioned that this returns a blank title on the android app.

gpvos 12y ago

I do feel that Unicode is slowly jumping the shark.

dsjoerg 12y ago

ᴅᴏᴇꜱ ᴀɴyᴏɴᴇ ᴋɴᴏᴡ ɪꜰ ᴩᴏᴩᴜʟᴀʀ ꜱᴇᴀʀᴄʜ ᴇɴɢɪɴᴇꜱ ᴅᴇ-ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ ᴡʜᴇɴ ɪɴᴅᴇxɪɴɢ?

guipsp 12y ago
Google does, atleast for fullwidth.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Which makes sense, as fullwidth is likely to be accidentally typed when using a Chinese/Japanese/Korean IME, and is entirely equivalent to normal characters, it just fits in with CJK text layouts better.
phpnode 12y ago
they definitely don't. Search for "ᴜɴɪᴄᴏᴅᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ" and you'll see the only matches are exactly that.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
They usually don't, because the text isn't supposed to be equivalent to "non-'Unicode'" text.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

parasj 12y ago

𝓖𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓹𝓪𝓼𝓼𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓼

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

JulianMorrison 12y ago

𝕸𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝕷𝖚𝖋𝖙𝖐𝖎𝖘𝖘𝖊𝖓𝖋𝖆𝖍𝖗𝖟𝖊𝖚𝖌 𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖛𝖔𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖗 𝕬𝖆𝖑𝖊.

arikrak 12y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7383672 though they changed my title to normal text.

edgarallenbro 12y ago

This is great, but why is the Australian translation called 'upside down pseudoalphabet'?

Immortalin 12y ago

On iOS 8.1 safari all I see is a bunch of squares ;(

ck2 12y ago

Note that XP cannot show Negative Circled Squared Negative Squared Double-struck Bold Bold italic Bold script Fraktur At least not with the fonts I have.

aruggirello 12y ago
Firefox on my Ubuntu 14.04 PC cannot show: Negative Circled Squared Negative Squared

codemonkeymike 12y ago

Continued use of this would be a good way of making me not use HN.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

I don't really speak/read Russian, but I have a passable understanding of Cyrillic, and those always look dumb. It doesn't look like "the" to be, it looks lik "guh-buh-yeh" or something. Same thing with the Borat DVD cover.

dang 12y ago
Or Toys Ya Us.

getdavidhiggins 12y ago

https://www.unicod.es/ https://www.unicod.es/

getdavidhiggins 12y ago

ｔｈｉѕ ｉѕ ｇｒéäｔ, ƅüｔ ìｔ'ｓｃｌ߀ｓèԁ ｓòùｒｃè!!! üｎíｔｏ߀ɭｓ ìѕ ϻùｃհ ƃｅｔｔëｒ!! https://www.unicod.es/ https://www.unicod.es/

aruggirello 12y ago

!ꙅᴙɘTliꟻ mAqꙅ ꟻo Tɘꙅ wɘᴎ ɘloHw A ꙅbɘɘᴎ ꙅiHT ,oᴎ HO

sovok 12y ago

Very cool. Although the upside-down text doesn't work with ümlauts and numbers. A reverse function would also be nice. I wrote a similar tool that does this (http://lunicode.com http://lunicode.com). It's on Github if you want to use the code: https://github.com/combatwombat/Lunicode.js https://github.com/combatwombat/Lunicode.js

cgranier 12y ago

What I need is something that takes all the extended characters (think Spanish or Swedish) and turns them into alternative safe versions. For instance, á into a, ñ into n, å into a, etc. Had my hopes up when I saw the title. Does anyone have any ideas or links to working scripts that I can turn into something useful? I need to "sanitize" a database of foreign documentaries before uploading to YouTube (their metadata input system chokes on extended chars). Thanks!

cataphract 12y ago
You can use ICU transliterators. Example for the PHP ICU bindings: http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php#111939 http://php.net/manual/en/transliterator.transliterate.php#11...
- cgranier 12y ago
  Thanks. This looks very promising. I'll dig into it and hopefully come out with a clean database ;-)
driax 12y ago
When you say safe alternatives, you mean ASCII right. You should think about looking into something which also understand the characters a bit better. For example å,æ,ø can mostly be turned into aa,ae,oe for danish and norwegian. Just turning them into a,?,o would change the meaning.
- cgranier 12y ago
  Exactly. I need to turn them into something meaningful.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    Well, there are two separate problems. First is phonetic similarity. This is mostly just to allow users to be able to understand each other and to help automatically catch alternate latinizations so you find out "Hey, he already registered under a latinized-spelling name". The second is glyph similarity. This is the security concern where you have two glyphs that are graphically similar but phonetically completely different, but can easily be mistaken for each other. These glyphs are used to trick and confuse users. The first kind of check won't catch these, but they're the reason we don't have unicode in domain names. Probably a correct system would have a very liberal interpretation of glyph similarity and would treat strings as matched when they contain similar glyphs.

tibbon 12y ago

It appears to work on Facebook and Twitter. ｉｎｃｅｐｔｉｏｎ

mxfh 12y ago

Since it wasn't mentioned here earlier, it's worth to take a look at shapecatcher to see what glyphs might resemble latin letters. Scribbling something resembling the latin capital letter A returns for example any of these codepoints: A𝘈ΑАÅ𝖠∆ДΔ𝐴𝟺дᎪߡ𝛢Å4𝛥ᴬᐃⵠ𐌀𝘼𝛬Λ△𝟦Ą𝜟𝓐⌓⧍ᗋ🜂Ⲇ🗻🍙ⲇѦᗩᗅ http://shapecatcher.com/ http://shapecatcher.com/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107) Also the Unicode Consortium has some reports on security: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ listing all kind of spoofing methods you haven even thought of.

Flott 12y ago

This is not good news if it bypasses the spam filters! Does it?

jackmaney 12y ago

I'd like to buy a vowel, please. Let's go with "e".

edem 12y ago

Can you do z̝̗a͈̣̳͓l͏g̱̭͖̜̙o̢̦̫̯ as well?

seqizz 12y ago

I feel nice.. http://i.imgur.com/lbvRWwm.png http://i.imgur.com/lbvRWwm.png

qeorge 12y ago

I was once bilked into buying some scraped content as original work by this method. It passed copyscape, and my test of Googling a a random sentence in quotes didn't bring anything up. I let it go because I had already accepted the work, and the lesson was worth more than the article anyway. Don't be fool as I was! Had I manually transcribed a sentence into Google instead of copying + pasting the Unicode chars, I would have found hundreds of copies of the same article.

seba_dos1 12y ago

𝕴 𝖋𝖊𝖊𝖑 𝖆 𝖓𝖊𝖜 𝖛𝖎𝖗𝖆𝖑 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖔𝖓 𝖘𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝖒𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖌.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
This has been a ⓣⓗⓘⓝⓖ [thing] for quite some time - guess it might be making a come back, I've seen zalgo (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zalgo http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/zalgo NSFW; ̖͈̪͙͉̰͈Z͓͎̬͓̯̖A̶̯̝̖͍̥̞L̻G̢̣̘͇̖͍̙O [Zalgo] generator http://www.eeemo.net/ http://www.eeemo.net/) and flip and reverse text live on my Facebook in the past at least.

GregBuchholz 12y ago

⎧1 if n = 0; F(n) ≡ ⎨1 if n = 1; ⎩F(n-1) + F(n-2) if n > 1. ⎛ ∇∙D⃑ = ρ ⎞ ⎜ ∇∙B⃑ = 0 ⎟ ⎜ ∇×E⃑ = -∂B⃑/∂t ⎟ ⎝ ∇×H⃑ = J⃑ + ∂D⃑/∂t ⎠ ⌠¹ π = 2⎮ √1̅̅-̅̅x̅̅²̅̅ dx ⌡₋₁ ⎡1 0 1⎤ ⎡î⎤ ⎢0 1 0⎥ ⎢ĵ⎥ ⎣1 0 1⎦ ⎣k̂⎦ Γ ⊢ t:S S<:T ――――――――――――――― (T-Sub) Γ ⊢ t:T ⎛ 1 ⎞ⁿ ℯ = lim ⎜1+ ― ⎟ ⁿ→∞ ⎝ n ⎠

lisper 12y ago
That's pretty slick. Did you do that manually?
- GregBuchholz 12y ago
  ╔════════════════════╗ ║ Yes. All manually ║ ╙────────────────────╜
- GregBuchholz 12y ago
  Common lisp reader macros anyone? ⎛if ⎛> (+ a b)⎞ ⎛case x ⎞ ⎛cond ⎞⎞ ⎜ ⎝ (- c d)⎠ ⎜ (1 'foo)⎟ ⎜ ((> y 2) 'quux) ⎟⎟ ⎜ ⎜ (2 'bar)⎟ ⎝ (t 'error)⎠⎟ ⎝ ⎝ (3 'baz)⎠ ⎠ ...(hmmm. For some reason that looks better in my editor than on the webpage. Apparently a fixed width font isn't necessarily fixed when it comes to unicode). http://imgur.com/oI0zVm3 http://imgur.com/oI0zVm3
cousin_it 12y ago
Nice! That's like ASCII art but with more characters, like U+2320 TOP HALF INTEGRAL, U+23A8 LEFT CURLY BRACKET MIDDLE PIECE, etc.
mxfh 12y ago
Great multiline stuff. Could be improved by using the actual U+2212 minus sign −, not - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) when getting super pedantic. Did something like this last week making extensive use of unicode block 1D400 and different space widths. http://math.typeit.org/ http://math.typeit.org/ helped as well. 𝑟₁ 𝑣 𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉 𝛼 ↓ ↓ 𝜔 𝐷 → 𝑅 → 𝑉 𝑟₂ 𝑣 https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/532575085337792512 https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/532575085337792512 formula is from http://algebraicvis.net/ http://algebraicvis.net/

vjvj 12y ago

🆃🅷🅴 🆂🅴🅲🆁🅴🆃 🅸🆂 🅾🆄🆃.

petecooper 12y ago

My iOS/Safari shows squares in the page itself, but a row of boxed aliens in the `Bookmarks and History` list: http://imgur.com/l98p9oN http://imgur.com/l98p9oN (image is safe for work, though other stuff on imgur.com is likely not)

ryanjmo 12y ago

เ ђคשє Շ๏ Շгץ Շђเร ๏ยՇ.

darkstalker 12y ago

I've used this page for a long time. Ｗｒｉｔｉｎｇｓｔｕｆｆｉｎｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈｕｎｉｃｏｄｅｆｏｒｓｕｒｅｍａｋｅｓｉｔｌｏｏｋｍｏｒｅｆｕｎｎｙ