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by computator 460 days ago
Just wanted to point out something that not everyone might realize:

Unicode is not supposed to have fonts at all. Unicode defines characters that you can then represent in various fonts. It just so happens that Unicode has many characters that happen to look like the letter "C" (as an example): © for copyright, ℂ for complex numbers (formally called Double-Struck Capital C), etc. The author uses these many variations as a fun way to make "fonts".

2 comments

If you want to dive into the details, you can copy the "fonted" output to a unicode analyzer. [0] is an online unicode analyzer that seems to work well.

[0]: https://devina.io/unicode-analyser

I often reach for jq to understand what unicode is in a string, e.g.:

  [wl-paste|xclip-o|pbpaste] | jq -R --ascii-output
It doesn't provide any per-character explanation, but it is local and I already have jq installed.
But Unicode is such a historically grown monster that it violates its own rules in many places.
Is it? Even emoji---one of the most controversial additions ever---was fully justified for its possible accessibility issue when it was introduced in Unicode.