Unicode includes six "zero-width characters" that are not visibly rendered in browsers (U+FEFF, U+200C, U+200D, U+200E, U+2060, U+180E) -- they're used for some specialized cases in rendering non-Roman alphabets. Read the rest

There are three Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting penises, each with Unicode characters: ?? ? Amazingly, no-one seems to know about them despite their being among the most succinct and obviously useful glyphs in the standard. The RealRevK reports:

They are rather innocuously named U+130B8: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052, U+130B9: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052A, and U+130BA: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053.

I cannot actually work out what the middle one is meant to be doing, to be honest. Looks painful.

Someone will no doubt explain to me that in fact that is not what the hieroglyph is and that I just have a dirty mind, but if that were true, why are they apparently censored in some fonts?

Many unicode characters fail to attract use simply because they aren't present in any common fonts. The penis unicode characters render for me on MacOS Mojave Firefox and Safari, but disappear in Chrome. Are you seeing it on your system? Are they missing or conspicuosly "censored"? Tell us in the comments!

UPDATE: WordPress's "Tags" panel automatically bowdlerizes a single penis by turning it into the ? emoji, but left dual penises unmolested. Read the rest

Unicode pioneer Michael Suignard has submitted a "Revised draft for the encoding of an extended Egyptian Hieroglyphs repertoire" in Unicode, trying to replicate the expressivity of the 7,000 hieroglyphs used in Greco/Roman times. Read the rest

Apple's been in the headlines over the past few months, for all of the wrong reasons. According to TechCrunch, their PR losing streak isn't going to stop any time soon.

TechCrunch reports that an IOS software development house has discovered that two unicode symbols, when inputted into a number of popular iOS apps, will cause the apps to crash. In many instances, once the apps crash, it's impossible to open them again. TechCrunch was able to recreate these crashes on a number of pieces of hardware running iOS and a Mac running the latest version of MacOS:

The bug crashes apps including Mail, Twitter, Messages, Slack, Instagram and Facebook. From our testing, it also crashed Jumpcut, a copy and paste plugin for Mac. While it initially appeared that the Chrome browser for Mac was unaffected and could safely display the symbol, it later crashed Chrome and the software would not reopen without crashing until uninstalled and reinstalled.

This isn't the first 'text bomb' issue that Apple's been confronted with. In January, it was discovered that it allowed a specific web address to crash any iPhone it was texted to.

Given that this bug effects so many different devices (all of which I use) I'm hoping that it gets sorted out fast.

Image courtesy of Pxhere Read the rest

Unicode Table has something over the other Unicode table sites: predictive search. There's useful tools as well: a HTML endoder/decoder, text-flipper Read the rest

Shapecatcher has just one job: find the unicode character that most closely matches the drawing you give it. It did pretty good finding the Ted Cruz symbol (and many similar ones, though the weirder you get the less likely your system will have a font that includes it) Read the rest

For years I've been using the Panix Unicode Text Converter to create ironic, weird or simply annoying text effects for use on Twitter, Facebook and other plain text-only venues. But now there's a new kid in town, YayText: "Super cool unicode text magic. Use s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶, ????, ???????, and ???? on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else." ??????? ??????? ?? ??????????! Read the rest