Staticfree Blog

I've just discovered a fun new game. I call it, Unicon. The goal is to come up with cute little pictures (icons of sorts, or a unicon) using unicode characters. "but there are so many characters!" ... yes, so many to work with! This is sorta like ascii art, except the focus is more microscopic: the characters themselves. An example:

A roasting potato

The real trick is to use the combination characters and other nifty unicode characters to your advantage. You put down a normal character, then follow it by one or more of the combination marks. You can do this fairly easily with a little bit of HTML knowledge:

• Take this template, save it to your hard drive
• Look at the charts mentioned above, pick a character you like and note the number below it. You can put that character into an HTML file by writing &#xNNNN; where you replace NNNN with the number below the character.

You can make all sorts of nifty things. The code for the one above is: o̫̾

I've discovered that, unfortionatly, mozilla doesn't do combining characters correctly. This is disappointing, as that leaves few remaining options, as IE most certainly won't do it correctly. XTerm does, though ☺