How does zalgo font work

It's kind of annoying to look at, but it really bothers me because it undermines my notion of what a character is supposed to be. My understanding is that a character is supposed to move horizontally across a line and stay within a certain "container". Obviously the Zalgo text is moving vertically and doesn't seem to be restricted to any space. Are these individual characters with weird properties? The text uses combining characters, also known as combining marks. See section 2. In Unicode, character rendering does not use a simple character cell model where each glyph fits into a box with given height.

Combining marks may be rendered above, below, or inside a base character. Such a sequence has no meaning of course, and even a monkey could produce it e.

Zalgo text works because of combining characters. These are special characters that allow to modify character that comes before. More about it here.

To produce a list of combining diacritical marks you can use the following script since links keep on dying. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Combining marks may be rendered above, below, or inside a base character.

Such a sequence has no meaning of course, and even a monkey could produce it e. When a decoder encounters an invalid sequence of bytes, it may depending on its configuration substitute?

One common reason for a "corrupt" sequence is that the wrong decoder has been applied. For example, the decoder might be UTF-8, but the page is actually encoded with ISO the default if another is not specified in the content-type header or equivalent.

The page in question uses ISO encoding. Make sure that you are using that decoder when converting the fetched resource to a String. Not intrinsically in Unicode. Unicode strings in general are not guaranteed to be Stream-Safe, but this could certainly be taken as a sign that Unicode don't intend to standardise new characters that would require a grapheme cluster longer than that.

There are many Zalgo text generators available online, saving you the time of making it yourself. This is just one of them that exists. Well, to be honest, Zalgo text is probably most widely used for the creation of spooky memes and the like. In fact, Zalgo text gets its name from the following:. Zalgo is an Internet legend about an ominous entity believed to cause insanity, death and destruction of the world, similar to the creature Cthulhu created by H.

Lovecraft in the s. Zalgo is often associated with scrambled text on webpages and photos of people whose eyes and mouth have been covered in black. Different software and applications tend to react differently to Zalgo text. By sending a messages containing Zalgo text with a great number of meta characters over 1 million he was able to cause a Gmail account to shut down. In one instance, the account shutdown lasted for four days.

In other words, one can easily generate Zalgo text by adding a specific mark to the letter or string. One can easily create a custom creepy or Halloween text style using the online Zalgo text generator here. Zalgo Text is a distorted version of the normal text that looks like a scary.

Do you often see how people post bizarre transitioned texts that look uniquely styled? These texts are portrayed as part of memes or images, some of which look nicely framed while some look very creepy. They certainly are grabbing a lot of attention in various media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Many new versions of these texts are introduced every now and then. Following is one such example of a Zalgo text. No wonder they look like some printing error is been made, hence smudging the characters and symbols all over each other.

As you can see above, the main text is still visible while the area on the top and beneath of the text is filled with transitioned texts and symbols.