My question may have more to do with font creation than graphic design. Those of you who have used Twitter/X a lot may have noticed that sometimes people type a special character in their posts or messages, when referring to that forum, that looks the same as their logo or icon. When I copy and paste it here, it looks like this: 𝕏. But on an Android device, it looks just like their logo or icon. It seems like somebody has created a special “character” that looks just like their logo or icon, but which does not belong to any particular character set, typeface, or font; and which can be copied and pasted into any text, without installing a font!? I am curious to how that is possible, and how it has been done; and how I could use the same technique to create my own special “character” that behaves in the same way. Any ideas?
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You appear to have created multiple accounts. Please see: I accidentally created two accounts; how do I merge them?– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented May 26 at 15:20
1 Answer
That character is called mathematical double-struck capital X. It is intended for mathematical usage similar how a double-struck R (ℝ), which is used for the real numbers. It was part of Unicode before Twitter even existed. If you want to reproduce this behaviour, you have to use something that resembles a existing Unicode character as well, which is a bad idea for many reasons, including:
Using it for the platform known as Twitter is Unicode abuse with the usual downsides of reducing portability, searchability, and accessibility. For example, that the character looks different on this website than on Android is simply because it looks different in different fonts, which is absolutely fine and should happen for the intended usage of that character, but wrecks portability if you abuse it.
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Thank you! I didn’t know that! That was a very interesting and informative reply. How about this solution: suppose I created an entirely new font for myself that has only one character in it, let’s say “A” (using the same Unicode), but with a peculiar design that I want it to have, that no other font does; and used it to type this particular character for myself. Anything wrong with that? I suppose nobody else would then be able to replicate or display it unless they had my special font installed! 😏– CuriousCommented May 26 at 13:40
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Sure, you can do that. But what would be the point? If you just want to insert some logo into a text, there are better ways to do that.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented May 26 at 15:20
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As for searchability Google recognizes 𝕏 - and our sites that support MathJax can use $\mathbb X$– RobCommented Nov 13 at 2:15
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@Rob: As for searchability Google recognizes 𝕏 – Yes, but in the sense that it replaces it with X. If I ever want to search for a mathematical object traditionally represented by 𝕏, I will get drowned in stuff about the platform known as Twitter even if case sensitivity is taken up to eleven. Very generally, you cannot blur the meaning of character sequences without searchability suffering from it. — our sites that support MathJax can use $\mathbb X$ – I fail to see what that’s even supposed to address.– Wrzlprmft ♦Commented Nov 13 at 5:57