Eli5: why does ̸̢̛̞̱͓Z̵̪͙͊̎̌ä̷̳͕̋̚l̵͉̙̓͘ͅg̴̫̠̑̈͜o̴̻͛ text look the way it does?

Question

Eli5: why does ̸̢̛̞̱͓Z̵̪͙͊̎̌ä̷̳͕̋̚l̵͉̙̓͘ͅg̴̫̠̑̈͜o̴̻͛ text look the way it does?

In: 5073

Answer 1

It includes combining diacritic marks. They are intended to overlap with the preceding character to produce one with a symbol above or below. Traditionally symbols like “ä” were complete letters of their own. But at some point it was realized that foreign languages would need too many combinations, and separate letters were created instead for “a” and combining diaeresis ̈̈̈̈̈.

Text systems of computers differ in how many of these relatively new symbols they will overlap and how precisely. Text coming from the Macintosh platform is often decomposed into these character pairs.