CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unicodecompositionascii-art
Digger
Digger

Reputation: 183

Unicode has "combining characters". How to use them?

with combining characters one can use 2 unicode characters at single location, creating a composition of two graphics. I'm thinking about simple ascii art, I would need to first use, as wikipedia says "SQUARE WITH HORIZONTAL FILL" ▤, and then on top of that, the letter "A". How to accomplish this?

Upvotes: 16

Views: 22860

Answers (4)

edarjolefeu
edarjolefeu

Reputation: 21

This is just for the mac users, but I came across this question and had no way of attempting to do this myself, I found this afterward for actually writing unicode characters without having to fool around: https://www.webnots.com/how-to-use-unicode-hex-input-method-in-mac/

tldr; There's a keyboard input encoding for Unicode Character input in Mac OS in the same area that you would enable other keyboard layouts for other languages. It's under Other at the bottom.

Upvotes: 2

Klaus Hauptfleisch
Klaus Hauptfleisch

Reputation: 41

Depending from the application or browser there are two ways to use the Unicode Combining Diacritical Marks:

  • With ā (a macron) as example, you may try to type in the 'a' first followed by the decimal code & #772;

  • or ALT+ (it must be the + from the numeric keypad) followed by the hexadecimal code 0304 (i.e U+0304).

In some cases you can type in the combining diacritical mark first, followed by the 'a' or any other leading letter.

Upvotes: 4

Pierre ALBARÈDE
Pierre ALBARÈDE

Reputation: 473

Square with Horizontal Fill U+25A4.

Combining Latin Small Letter A U+0363.

To obtain Square with Horizontal Fill topped by 'a' ▤ͣ in Ubuntu Text Edit, type

SHIFT CONTROL U 25A4 SHIFT CONTROL U 363 SPACE

Combining Latin Capital Letter A does not exist.

Upvotes: 2

user7711283
user7711283

Reputation:

What is possible with the method you describe is a kind of abuse of diacritical marks. Fell free to play around a bit with it using following demo ( http://demo.danielmclaren.com/2015/diacriticism/ ).

Below some screenshots of the Unicode code I have got from the demo above:

Claudio.txt content copied to a terminal Claudio.txt content copied to a terminal

Claudio.txt displayed in gedit Claudio.txt displayed in gedit

Claudio.txt displayed in SciTE Claudio.txt displayed in SciTE

Sorry, but I don't know at the moment why exactly the representation of same underlying Unicode text is looking different in SciTE.

Here the HexCode of the Claudio.txt file:

Claudio.txt displayed as hex code in GHex Claudio.txt displayed as hex code in GHex

and here the Unicode copied/pasted to the stackoverflow answer editor box:

C̱̙̳̲͇͉̄̄̚l̝̩̩̝̺̠͞ā̝͉̩̟͆u̻͈̘̞̪̅̿d̝̄̅͆̚i͇̙͈̎̚o̘̟̎̄̄̎

As you have to be able to show ASCII art in a terminal I assume that there is no way to overlay two arbitrary Unicode characters for this purpose.

Upvotes: 13

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