![]() ![]() So the small text letters that you see in the output box above are just a few of the 130,000+ symbols that are specified in the Unicode standard - just like the symbols that you're reading right now. So in order to get programmers and organisations to adopt the Unicode standard faster, Unicode began incorperating a bunch of weird symbols and rules that those people needed for their applications, and thus Unicode's full character set exploded to include include tens of thousands of different symbols, for many languages, and many arcane legacy systems.Īlong the way, it picked up a set of symbols which can be used to emulate "small caps" (an alphabet of small capital letters), and a somewhat incomplete set of subscript and superscript characters. They had specific character requirements that Unicode hadn't accounted for in their initial specification. ![]() Okay, so how does this relate to generating small text? Well, as it turned out, there were a bunch of people that weren't too interested in Unicode. Unicode sought to solve this by creating an international standard - meaning that everyone would be using the same number-to-letter "rule book". So the problem in the 1980s was that there wasn't a universally agreed-upon set of "rules" for which number refers to which character, and so every programmer was writing their own set of rules, and whenever their programs interacted with programs written by other programmers, they'd need to make specially designed "translators" to allow the programs to communicate. so that you can visualise them on a computer screen (otherwise you'd be reading ones and zeros right now). ![]() Computers only understand numbers, and so you need to tell the computer which number refers to the letter "a", which one refers to the letter "b", etc. Unicode is an international not-for-profit organisation that started in the 1980s as an effort to "unify" the "codes" for textual characters used in the computing industry. ![]() So how is this copy and paste stuff possible? Well, to answer that question, we need to learn a little bit about Unicode. You wouldn't be able to do that if it was just a font. You can tell they're not fonts because it's possible to copy and paste the small text generated into other websites (like your Instagram bio, a Tumblr post, etc.). It's fairly self-explanatory - you put some text in the first box, and it'll convert it into three different small text "fonts" for you. This eventually gave rise to scripts which automatically add the weird marking to letters and eventually to online translators like this one.Welcome! This website is (quite obviously) a small text generator. Someone noticed this and decided to play around with adding many more diacritics than reasonable so that the text became distorted and corrupted. These marks are called "diacritics", and as it turns out, The unicode designers never specified a limit to the number of diacritics that can be added to a character. So instead of specifying millions of different characters, Unicode just specified the basic fundamental building blocks plus a bunch of "marks" which can be added to characters. Unicode needed to design a system which would work for all written languages, and so it had to consider that many languages have a huge number of possible characters because certain "marks" can be added to characters to adjust their meaning. The story starts with the Unicode statndard the standards body which governs all the text symbols that you see on all your electronic devices. The corrupted nature of the text has interesting origins. ![]()
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