My display name on Twitter currently looks like @ɢᴇᴏʀɢᴇᴠʀᴇɪʟʟʏ@ᴛᴇᴄʜ.ʟɢʙᴛ, an attempt to route around Twitter's apparent censorship of Mastodon in­for­ma­tion.

I used the FSymbols Generators to produce several variants.

@𝕘𝕖𝕠𝕣𝕘𝕖𝕧𝕣𝕖𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕪@𝕥𝕖𝕔𝕙.𝕝𝕘𝕓𝕥
ʇqƃʅ.ɥɔǝʇ@ʎʅʅᴉǝɹʌǝƃɹoǝƃ@
@𝗀𝖾𝗈𝗋𝗀𝖾𝗏𝗋𝖾𝗂𝗅𝗅𝗒@𝗍𝖾𝖼𝗁.𝗅𝗀𝖻𝗍
@𝘨𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘷𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺@𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩.𝘭𝘨𝘣𝘵
@𝑔𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑒𝑣𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑦@𝑡𝑒𝑐ℎ.𝑙𝑔𝑏𝑡
@𝙜𝙚𝙤𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙫𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙮@𝙩𝙚𝙘𝙝.𝙡𝙜𝙗𝙩
@𝚐𝚎𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚟𝚛𝚎𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚢@𝚝𝚎𝚌𝚑.𝚕𝚐𝚋𝚝
@𝔤𝔢𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢𝔳𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔩𝔩𝔶@𝔱𝔢𝔠𝔥.𝔩𝔤𝔟𝔱

Many of these variants come from Unicode Block "Math­e­mat­i­cal Al­phanu­mer­ic Symbols".

There are a lot more things you can do with Unicode than just upside-down text.

I found something very useful in the dingbats range of Unicode characters: the negative circled san-serif digits, ➊ ➋ ➌ ➍ ➎ ➏ ➐ ➑ ➒ ➓ .

I've started using them to label points of interest in code. They play well with the code-block directive in re­Struc­tured­Text.

sudo docker images --format '{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}' \    ➊
    | grep $IMAGE_NAME \                                    ➋
    

I've long been a fan of Edward Tufte's work. I'm also a fan of old-style serif fonts, such as Bembo.

I happened across the R Studio Tufte Handout Style yesterday, and I was im­me­di­ate­ly struck by how much it resembles Tufte's books. It uses Tufte CSS and the open-source Tufte Book Font. ETBook is a “computer version” of Bembo that Tufte con­struct­ed for the more recent editions of his books, sup­plant­i­ng the lead type of the earlier editions.

I've adapted this blog's stylesheet to use ETBook and some of the other settings from tufte.css. It's not completely faithful; e.g., headings are bold, not italic.

Yesterday I showed File­For­mat's ɹǝʇɹǝʌuoↃ uʍo◖-ǝpısd∩ ǝpoɔıu∩. Although the lowercase letters generally looked good, several of the uppercase letters and numerals were un­sat­is­fac­to­ry. Looking through the Unicode Table site, I came across the Fraser Lisu alphabet, which is un­for­tu­nate­ly not well supported in most fonts. The following renders in Hack and Source Code Pro in MacVim, but not in the Source Code Pro webfont from Google Fonts:

B: ꓭ u+A4ED  Lisu Letter Gha
D: ꓷ u+A4F7  Lisu Letter Oe
J: ꓩ u+A4E9  Lisu Letter Fa
K: ꓘ u+A4D8  Lisu Letter Kha
L: ꓶ u+A4F6  Lisu Letter Uh
R: ꓤ u+A4E4  Lisu Letter Za
T: ꓕ u+A4D5  Lisu 

Unicode is so versatile that you can (more or less) invert the Latin alphabet:

ɐqɔpǝɟƃɥıɾʞʃɯuodbɹsʇnʌʍxʎz ∀𐐒Ↄ◖ƎℲ⅁HIſ⋊⅂WᴎOԀΌᴚS⊥∩ᴧMX⅄Z 012Ɛᔭ59Ɫ86
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
68Ɫ95ᔭƐ210 Z⅄XMᴧ∩⊥SᴚΌԀOᴎW⅂⋊ſIH⅁ℲƎ◖Ↄ𐐒∀ zʎxʍʌnʇsɹbdouɯʃʞɾıɥƃɟǝpɔqɐ

Obtained via the ɹǝʇɹǝʌuoↃ uʍo◖-ǝpısd∩ ǝpoɔıu∩. More at Unicode Upside-Down Mapping.

Update: more tomorrow.

One thing that's been bugging me since I started using Opera is that bold and italic text was showing as normal text in my personal blog. Yet other browsers were correctly displaying bold and italic on my blog.

I'm still not entirely sure why Mac Opera had a problem with it, but I fixed it by using the Lucida Hybrid stylesheet tweak.

body, #content {
    font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande",
        Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

strong, em, b, i {
    font-family: "Lucida Sans", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande",
      

I re-read Scott Hansel­man's blog post on using Consolas as the Windows Console Font, and I decided to put together a registry file to make it a little simpler. (You'll have to rename the file to console-font.reg after down­load­ing.)

The registry file includes entries for:

• Andale Mono
• DejaVu Sans Mono (an extended version of Bitstream Vera)
• Consolas

As Scott says:

(I'm afraid I can't distribute Consolas online or provide a download out of abject fear. That said, you can find it in any version of the Longhorn bits.)

Or Office 12, I believe.

Update, 2008/01/15. The Consolas Font Pack is the easiest way to get Consolas, if you don't have Office 2007 or Vista. Tech­ni­cal­ly, you are supposed to …continue.