Editorial Policy — Defined Characters vs Composed Combos

TextGlyphs is a reference as much as a tool, and a reference is only worth reading if somebody is checking it. This page says who checks what, against which source, and what happens when we get it wrong.

Last updated: 30 August 2026 · Published by the TextGlyphs editorial team

One source of truth: the Unicode Standard

Every glyph on this site is identified by its code point and its formal Unicode name, and both come from the standard itself rather than from another symbol site.

That sounds pedantic until you watch a wrong name propagate. One site labels a character slightly wrong. Three more copy the label because it is already visible on the web. Two years on it is the name everybody uses, and not one person has opened the code chart, because opening the code chart is precisely the step that was skipped at the start. Second-hand data is how that begins, so we do not use it.

Where a glyph’s behaviour depends on which Unicode version introduced it — and for newer symbols it usually does — that matters more than the name. A character added recently will be missing from older devices no matter how correct our page is, which is a fact about the reader’s phone that we can warn about but cannot fix.

The distinction we hold hardest

Some of what this site publishes is defined and some of it is composed, and the two are checked in completely different ways. Blurring them is the most common weakness in this niche.

A composed combo has no authority to check it against. Nobody standardised ꧁ ꧂ around a word; someone arranged it. So there is exactly one test that means anything for those: paste it somewhere real and see what arrives. We do not present a composition as though it were a standardised character, because that would be claiming an authority that does not exist.

Cursed text, honestly

Cursed and glitch text deserve their own note, because the usual editorial instinct actively breaks them.

They work by stacking combining marks far beyond what the text was designed for. Any routine that normalises, tidies or “cleans” the output removes exactly the marks that produce the effect — leaving plain text labelled as cursed text. So we do not clean it, and our copy grids serve it byte for byte.

The honest counterpart to that is a warning we put on the pages rather than in the small print: heavy combining marks are the least predictable thing on this site. They can render, be silently stripped, break line spacing, or be rejected by a platform outright, and which of those happens depends on the destination rather than on the characters. Publishing them without saying so would look more confident and serve you worse.

Testing: the reader’s device is the only judge

A glyph is drawn by whatever font the reading device has. Our own editor is not that device, which means a preview here proves nothing about what a reader will see.

So nothing goes on a reference page on the strength of how it looks on our screen. It is pasted into a real phone, and where Android and iOS disagree the page describes both outcomes rather than picking the prettier one and presenting it as the result you will get. When we know a glyph is patchy, that goes next to the glyph — not into a general disclaimer at the bottom that nobody reads.

Copy grids are served untouched

Characters in a copy grid are stored and delivered exactly as published: no stripped variation selectors, no removed combining marks, no substitution of a more common symbol for one that looked odd in a preview.

The rule has a visible consequence and an invisible one. Visibly, a grid item sometimes looks strange in a browser and pastes perfectly into an app. Invisibly, if we ever “fixed” that, the thing you came to copy would be the thing we deleted.

Dates mean something here

Each page carries the date it was last checked. That date moves only when the content genuinely changed — not when a plugin updated, not on a scheduled touch, and never backwards.

This is worth being strict about because a freshness date is only useful as a signal of when a human last looked. A date that updates automatically tells you nothing while looking like it tells you something, which is worse than showing no date at all.

Corrections

We correct errors on the page where they appeared, and the updated date moves with the correction. We do not delete a page to make a mistake go away and we do not edit quietly.

Reports that a glyph broke somewhere are the most useful mail we get: platform rules change without announcement and we cannot test every app every week. The contact page says what to include.

Independence and authorship

No paid placements, no sponsored symbols, no affiliate links. Nothing appears on this site because someone paid for it to appear.

Pages are published by the TextGlyphs editorial team and signed that way. We do not invent an expert with a name, a photograph and a credential to make a page look more authoritative — a fabricated byline is a lie about the single most checkable element on the page. Who we are is on the about page; how we work is here.