text.makeup

I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause for an unexpected reasons:

Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆)

I thought the two different calendars was some trickery, but the answer is simpler than that. I did not realize that, inexplicably, there are two distinct calendar emoji: one for calendar, and one for a tear-off calendar.

The way I learned about it was to use a tool I made a few years ago called text.makeup:

I thought this would be a nice opportunity to share it with you. If you’re debugging a string you don’t understand, or are just interested in learning about various Unicode or encoding secrets through playing (see the left sidebar!), it might be a fun thing to use.

I just updated it with the most recent emoji (and Unicode goodies) that will drop after September this year.