Text makeup – a tool to decode and explore Unicode strings | Hacker News Reader

Text makeup – a tool to decode and explore Unicode strings

text.makeup

98 pointsmicroflash12 comments

It gets a little tiny bit out of whack with Zalgo text.

e.g., https://text.makeup/#P%CC%B4%CD%82%CC%96h%CC%B4%CC%84%CC%8E%...

edit: in fact, due to all the combining marks it will only paste 14 chars of my text into the box. I originally typed: "Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn." into the Zalgo generator and tried to paste that output in.

https://zalgo.org/

I just popped over there to see, and it looks like that sentence, Zalgo-fied, comes out at 1,979 bytes for me. I imagine you're brushing up against some 256 byte limit or something.

Just in case, from the command line I recommend uni: https://github.com/arp242/uni

I like the explanations of complex emoji, such as

https://emojipedia.org/artist-dark-skin-tone

who is composed out of four unicode characters. I wish it had unihan data for Chinese characters, say

https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=%...

not so much the cryptic codes but the readings.

Feel free to add this request on the repo here: https://github.com/mwichary/text-makeup/issues/new

https://babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html works well for me for this purpose. It shows all the names and code points.

While numerous similar tools do already exist, I think an inline annotation is a neat interface and can be leveraged much more. Font requirements, segmentation boundaries, script detection and many others.

I never knew emoji variants and stuff worked like that.. Fantastic tool, intuitive interface.

Really nice design. This GUI style has a bit of a Smalltalk-80 vibe, with the raster line shadows and old-style fonts.

A tiny observation... The examples box that peeks from the left-hand edge works great, but it's slightly confusing that it's showing the X button initially (when there isn't anything to close yet). How about making this icon initially display as a disclosure triangle (something like a > shape), and then morph into the X when the box is actually open?

Agreed, love the look and typography. You don't see too many serif fonts in interfaces these days.

I did a lot of setting posters in serif type a year ago or so and came to the conclusion that most tools do a horrible job of kerning.

It did not seem so bad to me at any point in the past (making posters for a college radio station in the early 1990s, making posters for the Green Party in the early 2000s, etc.) I don't know if I got pickier or if a patent war caused regressions in most text rendering systems. I figured out how to manually kern in Powerpoint (awkward but I can get great results) and also a bunch of options in Illustrator that improve things but still require a manual kerning to look right consistently.

I look around and don't see a lot of people setting posters with Serifed fonts and I think it may be that people see they look awful and don't have the knowledge or time to do anything about kerning.

Great website. I've been using a similar tool a lot lately for UTF-8 work:

https://unicode.scarfboy.com/

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