

Amazing UTF-8 Symbols for Twitter - hoopitr
http://twsym.com/

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GiraffeNecktie
Note that about half of these symbols appears as empty boxes on IE6.

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pavel_lishin
Same in Firefox 3.5.6 in OS X.

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cema
Depends on the font. In many cases, a default font is selected such that it
shows Latin characters rather well and other alphabets ok, but support for
non-alphabetical unicode characters may be spotty. You can see all these
characters if you use a font which contains a wide selection of unicode
characters, but you may not want to switch to it as the default.
Alternatively, you may see some of these characters in fonts which are
designed for specific portions of unicode.

All this has little to do with the browser or operating system. As long as you
have a font installed and a browser that can use the font you select.

Another way to control the looks is, of course, to specify the fonts on the
web page in html or css. (See font-family.)

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tibbon
Better yet- Twitter fully supports other languages such as Arabic and Japanese
rather well (or at least AFAIK).

While it seems simple, loads of programs and services don't support them well.
Can you make a HN account with a name in one of those languages and have it
show well? (maybe you can, but I'm unsure)

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DLWormwood
If you're using a iPhone, you can also use Glyphboard, which has lower page
loading overhead and is right sized for the platform...

<http://www.mrgan.com/gb/>

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novum
Not just for Twitter, really, but anywhere that supports UTF-8 characters.

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fiddomoo
FaceBook, Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress.. etc. - all supports UTF-8
characters

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IgorPartola
There are plenty of Unicode symbols that can be used in web design as an
alternative to images. Combine that with CSS gradients and you can cut your
page load times by a lot.

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moe
˙˙˙sʎɐʍ ƃuıʇsǝɹǝʇuı ǝɹoɯ ɥɔnɯ os uı pǝsnqɐ ǝq uɐɔ ǝpoɔıun ˙ǝןɔıʇɹɐ ƃuıɹoq

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jonursenbach
What, was twittersymbols.com taken?

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z8000
☛☺☚ twitter users love attention

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jodrellblank
'Amazing' is unjustified hype. They're much like Wingdings font characters
from ten or twenty years ago.

Particularly unimpressive are the pound sign £ (UK currency, available
anywhere anyway), and ı which renders as a featureless vertical bar on that
page but a subscript bold number one when I paste it here. Which is about the
kind of awkwardness I expect with unicode - I don't know what it is or how to
pronounce it or which services will accept it or which clients will display it
in which ways. Unicode is a proper fallen log in the road, it's like someone
dumping a Курица word in the middle of a sentence - I don't know the language
or the script, I can't pronounce it or remember the shape accurately and can't
mentally work with it in any useful way. Except it's worse because while ♌
might be a word or character or sound in some human language, ✺ and ❀ are not.

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ugh
All Unicode characters do have actual descriptions. And always a reason why
they are in there. If you don't misuse any character you won't have any
problems. Why the Unicode hate?

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jodrellblank
> Why the Unicode hate?

I don't know for sure - bad experience with it once, perhaps? I get fed up of
IT, particularly stuff which is massive and complicated and finicky,
particularly when it was designed by committee and foisted upon me and I don't
benefit from it.

Other people just don't see the virtue in keeping their stuff simple so that
it keeps my life simple. They should care less about showing off their
"ability to put a telephone in a font" chops and more about how much I don't
want to deal with whether the telephone is upper or lower case or the
consequences of some wag putting it in their contact field and causing poorly
written client software to crash when displaying it. Actually, that hasn't
happened to me yet, but I'm just waiting for the phonecall where someone's web
filtering software meets unicode domain names and falls flat on its face.
"What site are you trying to go to?" "Some unpronouncable symbols".

When we/you/everyone can agree how to display tabs then we'll be getting
somewhere and we can address the little squares of undisplayability.

It's not just unicode though, most sofware and hardware feels the aeriform
wrath of my grumpy scowling.

