Show HN: unicode.style

Screen readers don’t do very well with this, so please only use it for novelty purposes. Otherwise you will unnecessarily be locking people out from what you write.

I&#x27;m having trouble understanding what this does. Apparently there&#x27;s a popover when you select the text you typed. I had to go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ekmartin&#x2F;unicode-style" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ekmartin&#x2F;unicode-style</a> to figure this out.

I have been using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com</a> for quite a while. Only for novelty purposes, of course.

Underlines a̲r̲̲̲e̲̲̲̲̲̲̲ ̲̲̲̲̲̲̲a̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲ ̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲l̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲ittle nesty when re-selecting already underlined characters from the left

This seems like a major source of security issues. How can i protect myself from it?<p>Am i supposed to normalize ALL untrusted user input or will that break normal text in some language i&#x27;m not familiar with? Or only normalize things that are supposed to be unique, like urls, usernames and other identifiers?

I would make it more clear what the app does and that you should highlight text to format it.<p>I discovered that by accident.

On iOS, the selection popover interferes with the one you designed.

Doesn&#x27;t work with accented latin alphabet characters (&quot;ü𝕓𝕖𝕣&quot;) - is it a fundamental restriction of the styled unicode charset or a mapping issue? Seems like it should be supported but would need a transition from precomposed characters to the equivalent combination of letter + diacritic.

What about &quot;strikethrough&quot; and &quot;slashthrough&quot;?[0,1,2]<p>P.S.: It&#x27;s look like you reinvent YayText[3] website ;-)<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;adamvarga.com&#x2F;strike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;adamvarga.com&#x2F;strike&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;strike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;strike&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;slash&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;slash&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yaytext.com&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ekmartin&#x2F;unicode-style&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;transform.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ekmartin&#x2F;unicode-style&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;src&#x2F;tr...</a><p>I learned something new today, thanks!

Android Firefox is just showing me black boxes for those Unicode ranges, so this definitely can&#x27;t be very effectively used everywhere (I haven&#x27;t tried yet, but I&#x27;m guessing some native messaging apps may have similar issues).

You should keep the toolbar on the screen.

Neat idea but completely unusable on Firefox mobile due to the context menu that pops up whenever text is selected and obscures the site&#x27;s menu that does the same.

There is something about rendering these unicode code points that seems to make Firefox jank more than usual (when scrolling this page up and down). Are rendering these code points especially costly for some reason?

People might find Unicode Text Converter useful as well.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qaz.wtf&#x2F;u&#x2F;convert.cgi?text=Hacker_News" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qaz.wtf&#x2F;u&#x2F;convert.cgi?text=Hacker_News</a>

𝔥𝔦 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖 𝓯𝓻𝓲𝓮𝓷𝓭

Not clear what this does? Also, copy button doesn’t work on iOS.

Nice work. +1 I would 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 to see this as a chrome plugin.

Is it just me, or does the BB style render the most interesting characters as rectangles? (Chrome on OS X)<p>𝔸 𝔹 𝔺 𝔻 𝔼 𝔽 𝔾 𝔿 𝕀 𝕁 𝕂 𝕃 𝕄 𝕅 𝕆 𝕇 𝕈 𝕉 𝕊 𝕋 𝕌 𝕍 𝕎 𝕏 𝕐 𝕑

This is entertaining but it&#x27;s completely broken on Chrome mobile in a way I&#x27;ve never seen before.

This would be great as an Emacs extension. Is there something like this?

𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢.𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢<p>𝔉𝔬𝔯𝔪𝔞𝔱 𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱 𝔲𝔰𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢 𝔠𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰. 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔢 𝔞𝔫𝔶𝔴𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔱 𝔞𝔠𝔠𝔢𝔭𝔱𝔰 𝔭𝔩𝔞𝔦𝔫 𝔱𝔢𝔵𝔱.

Neat. Suggestion: maybe don’t “underline” characters such as y or g

This reveals all kinds of bugs in current software.<p>For example, if I use the tool to make a url italic, then pasting that url into Chrome&#x27;s url bar gives me back a bunch of unicode rectangles.<p>But that&#x27;s not what I wanted. I wanted Chrome&#x27;s url bar to interpret those unicode code points as an italic version of the actual unicode code points I want. Chrome should add a check for edge cases like these and add branches to map the string to the corresponding non-styled code points automatically.<p>Someone needs to send lots of bug reports to all the relevant pieces of software that currently have this bug. Firefox, Chromium, probably Edge, Webkit. Those are just the browsers, but I&#x27;m sure there are more. I&#x27;m not actually sure about Firefox tbh, but maybe just send the bug report first and see if it gets accepted to find out.<p>Ooh, here&#x27;s another one-- if you paste some unicode.style&#x27;d text into LibreOffice does it convert it to the &quot;normal&quot; code points and add the relevant styling? If not, it should, otherwise it&#x27;s broken.<p>Actually, I just realized another issue. If I type something in the url bar that is styled with unicode.style, then there is no way for Chrome to know whether I want it displayed styled or not.<p>For example, maybe I&#x27;m pasting it there temporarily so that I can copy&#x2F;paste it later in a Tweet. In that case I probably want to keep the current styling for the tweet.<p>So Chrome should map to the normalized unicode code points (just in case I&#x27;m typing a url or want to instantiate a search), but still <i>display</i> the styled version. Then when I copy it again, it should put the unicode.style version into the buffer. And the app which receives the pasted buffer should receive the unicode.style code points. And of course that app should also normalize it underneath while retaining the styled display for the same reasons.<p>To deal with this complexity, there should probably be a standardized way for all apps to deal with styled text.<p>Please help by testing every app and filing relevant bug reports.