Comments on: Exploring browser-supported Unicode characters and a tweet shortening experiment

By: David Higgins

David Higgins — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 21:40:00 +0000

Hi Lea. I am grateful for this tool. So much so, I have included into my set of Unicode tools, available at:

Enjoy

By: twee+: Longer tweets, no strings attached | Lea Verou

twee+: Longer tweets, no strings attached | Lea Verou — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 05:28:03 +0000

[...] know, the 140 character limit on twitter bugs me a lot sometimes, and I’ve tried to find a way to overcome it previously as well. The most common ways these days seems to be either cutting down the long tweet [...]

By: Lea Verou

Lea Verou — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:49:43 +0000

I actually started working on it shortly afterwards, but I was quite disappointed to find out that not all alphanumeric characters have superscript and subscript equivalents
There is a super/subscript equivalent for numbers (although in some fonts and font sizes they don’t even match (test: 2¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰ 2₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉₀)), =, +, -, parentheses and only a few alphabetic characters (and even those don’t have the same heights).
I have quite abandoned the script for now, but I might finish it sometime in the future, dunno. I do use personally it to quickly find some special characters, so if I keep using it, I’ll probably want to improve it sometime.

By: kangax

kangax — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:03:40 +0000

I actually had the very same idea about half a year ago I started working on a script to do exactly this kind of beautification, but never really had enough time to finish it.

What’s funny is that it was this old dusty script that I glanced into when suggesting (c) and (R) in this post. And here you are having the same idea!

By: Lea Verou

Lea Verou — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:43:28 +0000

Your suggestions gave me an idea: I could include a set of replacements that “beautify” the text (even without savings in some cases), which would include your suggestions along with: replacing normal quotes with curly “typographer’s” quotes, \^([0-9]+) to $1 in superscript and _([0-9]+) to $1 in subscript (geez, did I actually start using regular expressions to communicate with human beings? I’m doomed…), and similar replacements. So, I could add a switch for all those (a switch for just (c), ™ and (R) seems a bit redundant). I could move some of the existing ones there too (like — (2 hyphens) to —). Kinda like what WP does to posts and comments, but more extensive. What do you think?

By: kangax

kangax — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:10:10 +0000

Sorry, forgot “(” and “)” around “tm” So… I was thinking of “(tm)”, as well as (c) and maybe (R). Aren’t those used almost exclusively as a replacement for ©, ™, and ® ?

Those seem like rare case scenarios, of course, so it might not even be worth it.

As far as obtrusiveness, a switch to toggle them on/off would probably solve the problem.

By: Lea Verou

Lea Verou — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:47:14 +0000

Hi kangax!!

I thought about these as well, since they are fairly common symbols that someone frequently needs.

However, wouldn’t it be too invasive to assume that every (c) is a copyright symbol? There’s even a separate ligature for (c) (⒞ – #249E).

As for TM, I couldn’t come up with a suitable a search string either. Which one are you suggesting? It’s not very clear from your comment. Not just the letters “TM”, right? It would make the text look weird and unreadable to replace every TM with ™ (for instance ATMOSPHERE would become A™OSPHERE), completely missing the point of “tweet shortening that doesn’t make you look like a douche”…

By: kangax

kangax — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:58:49 +0000

And maybe ™ → ™ (TRADE MARK SIGN) as well.

By: kangax

kangax — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:57:24 +0000

By: Another approach on email hiding « Lea Verou

Another approach on email hiding « Lea Verou — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:36:30 +0000

[...] exploring browser-supported Unicode characters, I noticed that apart from the usual @ and . (dot), there was another character for an @ sign [...]