[Update] Allah Sulu's Text Converter
It’s been about a year since I last mentioned my Massive Tool Text Converter, so I figured I’d mention all of the changes I’ve made since it was last profiled. (I also decided not to discuss it on April Fool’s Day this time around, since no one believes anything they read online on April Fool’s Day… Or, at least, they shouldn’t (without due consideration, that is). Anyway, the first thing that’s obvious comparing the web page from last year with the web page as it is now is that there are far more options available:
[Click Here to Reveal a Screen Shot]
The user enters text in the first text box, which is shaded in a lighter green than the rest of the page, and then gets converted text in eight different white-shaded boxes below. Most of the boxes have controls underneath them for selecting a variety of options.
The first output text box can return either “Γαuχ Grεεκ” or “Fдцж Яцssɪди” text, both of which were available on the original page, and a third option I call “ᔕ⊂ᚱ|ᛒᛒᒪ∈.” The user can toggle between the three options by using the radio buttons beneath the text box. For Scribble text, you may want to mix upper- and lower-case letters in your input so that the output characters are not all uniform. Note that entering “+)” will give you the hammer-and-sickle character (☭) in the Faux Russian converter. You can also get different results with “:)” or “:(” emoticons.
The next output box is for “Ⓑⓤⓑⓑⓛⓔ Ⓣⓔⓧⓣ”, and comes with a few new options. You can choose to have spaces replaced by empty bubbles, or to have (some) punctuation characters also enclosed in bubbles, and even display numbers in a few different ways: standard (①⑨), inverse (❶❾), two-digit (⑲), and two-digit inverse (⓳). Note that twenty is the highest two-digit number that you can display in a single inverse bubble, and that fifty is the highest that you can display in a standard bubble. If you entered “:)” in the text box, you can use the inverse button to get an inverse smiley (☻) instead of the regular one (☺).
The third text box returns the text as a string of words using the military “ALPHA BRAVO CHARLIE” radio callsigns for each letter. I used to work with people who insisted that things (like passwords or URLs) be spelled out that way over the phone, and I never bothered to memorize that code, so I used to use a macro in the Massive Tool to do the conversion for me. Well, now it’s in this Text Converter web page as well. (If there’s ever a need to, I can add controls to this text box for different versions of the alphabet callsigns, as I think different military branches and/or organizations have slightly different versions.)
The fourth text box is for “ƨbяɒwʞͻɒᗺ” and “uʍop-ǝpısdn” text. There are a number of sites that convert to upside-down text (using lower-case letters only), but I also worked out backwards text - and allow for all upper-case, all lower-case, or a mixture in the converted text. I also tried, where possible, to find upside-down and backwards versions of other characters, not just letters, but with mixed success. Not every character has an upside-down or backwards variant in unicode.
The fifth text box returns the user’s text converted into Germanic Runes (ᚨᛚᛗᚩᛊᛏ ᛚᛁᚴᛖ ᛞᚹᚨᚱᚡᛖᚾ), and two different Japanese character sets: Hiragana (ひらがな) and Katakana (かたかな). All but Katakana were already available last year BUT now, after you’ve created and posted the converted text, someone can copy and paste the runes/hiragana/katakana back into the Text Converter to reverse the process. Finally, just for fun, when using Germanic Runes numbers are converted into Roman numerals. Why? Why not?
The sixth text box provides for a variety of text styles, including unicode equivalents of standard text styles. Some of them use characters at the high end of the unicode chart (above u+FFFF) and may not display properly on all websites or in all fonts/browsers.
The seventh text box is based on an idea that I saw elsewhere, but greatly expanded upon. It’s for use on platforms like Twitter which limit the number of characters you can enter at a given time. Many unicode characters are composed of multiple letters, or at least resemble multiple letters, so that one could use one of those characters in the place of two or more regular letters to expand the length of the message that you can fit within a limited number of characters. Again, however, not every reader will be able to see those special characters (especially, from what I've seen, people reading Twitter on their cell phones), so caution is still recommended. This converter also creates some other graphics characters, such as “<3” being converter to “♥”.
The last text box on this page, just as it was a year ago, is primarily for diacritics, but with a few other options as well. You can use these characters to underline words in Twitter or Facebook, although (in the former case) that will add to your tweet's character count.