Weird character... Wondering what this is?

[ravenvii]

Here's the character:

?

What's that character? I've never seen it before until today.

???????????
? WEIRD! ?
???????????

EDIT: wow, it only shows as a ? in the boards... nevermind, I guess. :/

 

[Mr. Anderson]

post a screen shot of the character

D

 

[Makosuke]

Yes, a screenshot will help, but I'll bet it looks a litle like a box with a funny-looking W and m on top of each other in it. If so, that's the character the MacOS defaults to if it can't find any appropriate character in any of the fonts you have installed.

Assuming this is the one, if you enlarge it you'll note that the box says "Private Use" because it's in the "private" section of the unicode spec; the funny looking letter in the box is the letter wum, from the Dr. Seuss book "On Beyond Z".

And if that's not what you're talking about, there's some random trivia for you.

 

[ravenvii]

Ok, here's a screenshot...

 

[Makosuke]

Nope, nevermind--not what I was talking about at all.

It's not Japanese or Chinese, either, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't look like Korean, Hebrew, or Arabic.

Where did you come up with it?

And you can find out what it's Unicode itentifier is by pasting it into the Character Palette. To get it, open the International Prefpane, and turn on "Character Palette" for the input menu. In the menu that shows up in your menu bar (if you didn't already have it there), select Character Palette, set "View" up at the top to "All Characters", paste it in the search box down at the bottom, and see what comes up. If you expand the "Character Info" arrow, it should tell you what its name is as well as what script it comes from.

Tell us what you find--I'm curious.

 

[ravenvii]

Whoa.

Apparently this character is a member of the Geometrical Shapes category, and is called the Medium Shade.

Thanks, Makosuke.

 

[Makosuke]

Aha! I was half-right in my guess it was a border or something--I remember seeing those border pieces browsing through all the Unicode junk that nobody ever uses.

The reason it looks so weird is that the dot pattern in the shade obviously got dithered very badly at that small of a size, so it ended up looking like some weird pattern instead of just a consistent set of dots.