Local time: 2012-02-23: 5:44:56 AM © Copyright 2003–2011 Darkhorse WinterWolf

winterwolf.co.uk

I've recently opened a Twitter account to see what all the fuss was about. It's now just under three weeks and 291 tweets on, and so often I'm just a character or two over the 140 character limit for a tweet.

I had noticed, though, that since I was able to write tweets in Norwegian and Japanese, this is a 140 character rather than a 140 byte limit. Also, since I'm a bit of an amateur typographer (much to the annoyance of some people), I found I was able to use things such as the ellipsis (…) and a range of dashes (-, –, —…) where required, which are easy for me to insert with a compose key.

Then, my thoughts ran to ligatures. Surely these could be used to great reduce the number of characters taken up by a tweet. The thing is, whilst I can easily remember to use the compose key for something that I can't type on my keyboard, using it for something I can type is a whole different kettle of fish. So, this is what this little page is for.

Why do this? That's a good question. I can't combine all ligatures, as unicode specifically will not allow this, but it does provide representations for some common ones. For long tweets, services such as Twitlonger already exist, and whilst they integrate well with certain clients, they don't integrate well with all of them, which is annoying to me. The output of this script should with with any Twitter client that understands unicode. I've tried to avoid clobbering URLs, #tags and @usernames

So, just type your message in below, submit it and it'll transform character groups into their respective glyphs. At the moment, this is a bit of a test, so it'll just do the conversion and present the results for copy/paste into your favourite client, but if it proves useful I'll add OAuth integration with Twitter to provide the option to post directly.