On Beyond Unicode
So, uh, wow.
In a chunk of garbage text in Safari, I saw the following
character:
I had to blow up the font a few times until I could really see it.
I then blew it up some more until I believed it. Was that a
letter from On Beyond Zebra, by Dr. Seuss?
Sure enough, WUM seems to be the icon conventionally used to denote
the Unicode Private Use Area. It gets better,
though—it seems that there are some proposals for
artificial scripts to be included in the Private Use Area. Among
those scripts: On Beyond
Zebra, Tengwar
and Cirth (by
J.R.R. Tolkien), and, of course, Klingon.
Update 10/20: Wikipedia has a great Apple typography
article, including a section on Fonts
in Mac OS X which explains what we’re seeing: a character from the
LastResort font.