Diacritiques

My friend and resident Unicode advisor Patrick Hall, when not busy getting the blogosphere on the road towards mutually translating itself, has branched out into the comic strip genre.

I fully admit that I lent a hand (or rather, a few brain cells) in the naming process, but the idea is all his: three-panel strips that feature glyphs from the vast set covered by Unicode and named the way Unicode characters usually are: “U+” plus the hexadecimal number of the character’s code point.#[1]

So check out Loonicode. And badger Pat not to stop at the third instalment!

(What does it say about my geekiness level that these comics give me uncontrollable fits of giggles?)

[The spell-checker didn’t know: geekiness.]

Note:

[1]: On my Gnu/Linux system with a Gnome desktop, the code point allows me to enter the character: I hold down SHIFT plus CTRL at the same time, type the hex code, and release the two keys. If I have an appropriate font installed, the character appears. Here’s U+1DC2 COMBINING SNAKE BELOW, enlarged a bit: ᷂. I sometimes use this feature for entering IPA. Our good friend LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA (ə), for example, is U+0259.