Fancy text isn't a font. That's why your hashtags stop working.
Paste 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 into a search box and search for hello . You get nothing. That surprises people, and it shouldn't. The bold text you copy from a "fancy…
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The Story: Liberating Kannada’s Beauty from the ASCII Trap
For years, I have carried a quiet frustration every time I opened modern design software. Kannada is visually stunning—a script of elegant curves an…
Unicode 18.0: Essential Updates Every Dev Needs Now
Unicode 18.0 Is Here: What Developers, Designers, and Translators Must Do Right Now Introduction Unicode 18.0 dropped this spring with the biggest e…
Why JavaScript Text-to-Binary Snippets Break on Emoji
A text-to-binary function can pass every test with Hello and still produce the wrong bytes for 🙂 . The catch is deciding what “binary” means. For th…
Copy-Paste Fonts Are Not Fonts. Here Is What Broke My Code
This is part 4 of my beginner journey. In part 1 I did not know what to learn first. In part 2 I stopped overthinking and picked a project: Fonti, a…
There's no superscript "q" in Unicode — and other things I learned building a superscript generator
Quick quiz: how do you write "x² + y³" in plain text, no HTML, no LaTeX? Easy, right? `²` and `³` are just characters. Now write "E = mcᵠ" — wait, t…
Unicode Text in JavaScript: How Fancy Text Generators Actually Work
Have you ever wondered how text like this works? 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐨 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 or: 𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓵𝓸 𝓦𝓸𝓻𝓵𝓭 It may look like someone simply changed the font, but in many cases som…
The homoglyph trick against similarity checking is documented - as not working
Drop a Cyrillic о into the middle of a word and a string matcher stops seeing the word, while the page looks identical. It is the kind of thing you…
How Unicode Text Works: Why Stylish Fonts Can Be Copied and Pasted
Have you ever copied a stylish username from one website and pasted it into Instagram, Discord, or another app without installing any font? It can s…
UCE-8: fitting the world's living scripts into two bytes
UCE-8 — Unicode 3-byte variable-width Compact Encoding — is a character encoding sized for the world's living scripts, reaching 128 × 128 × 68 = 1,1…
Javanese Script Isn't Just "An Old Alphabet" — It's a Completely Different Writing System
Most of us think about writing systems the way we grew up with one: separate letters, one sound each, read left to right. But not every script works…
Why Arabic text comes out backwards when you extract it from a PDF (and how to fix it)
If you've ever built a feature that extracts text from PDFs, an Arabic-speaking user has probably filed this bug: "the words come out in reverse ord…
The Unicode trap I had to design around in a LinkedIn formatter
I built a small tool for formatting LinkedIn posts, and the deceptively simple part was also the most important part: styled text is not formatting.…
How I built a Nepali Unicode-Preeti converter
How I Built a Nepali Unicode-Preeti Converter Nepal has a unique font problem. Modern Nepali text uses Unicode — the international standard, works e…
Why "fancy fonts" in Discord and Instagram bios turn into boxes
You've seen it everywhere — 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮 Discord names, 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 Instagram bios, ʙᴜʙʙʟᴇ usernames. You've probably also seen the cursed version: someone's cl…