What do you think of strange texts?

u/novenary December 05, 2016, 02:08:52 PM

Quote from: JosJuice on December 04, 2016, 04:34:58 PM
Quote from: p2 on December 04, 2016, 12:11:48 PM
the trick behind it is strange text symbols that have a letter width of 0px.
Noone really knows what they're actually ment to be used for..
They're used for putting diacritics on letters, but normally you're only meant to use one or maybe two per letter, depending on the language. For instance, you can write é by first writing an e and then using a special combining ´ character. In case of é, it's very rarely done that way because there already is a pre-composed é character, but some languages use combinations of letters and diacritics that don't have any pre-composed characters in Unicode.

That's pretty much it. As a matter of fact, since I've worked with unicode stuff a lot, I'll add that you can do this with pretty much any combination of characters. Very few text rendering engines handle that kind of stuff properly because they either didn't bother reading the specs (I wrote my own utf-8 decoder, and took a look at some others for reference, they were all broken beyond repair even though the algorithm is trivial and described in detail in the unicode spec) or because of the extreme complexity involved (which is why HarfBuzz is pretty much the only text shaping library out there nowadays, and it's used by browsers).

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 05, 2016, 06:31:03 PM

Which reminds me, aeTIos should make a post in the staff forum on how to ban someone from WIRC by using those characters in the user nick, since WIRC has a bug about that

(at least it would still allow the user to see the chat, just not sending text)

u/p2 December 05, 2016, 09:48:07 PM

so by changing user's names in the IRC you can mute them? That can definitely come in handy

u/Yuki December 06, 2016, 01:59:32 AM

So as I understand, you guys found a bug in WIRC I don't need to fix because it does some unintended, but useful side effect? Nice. Just document it somewhere and we're in business.