up vote 3 down vote favorite

I never had any idea how people used to insert Cthulu script into pages, but since this site is rife with Eldritch Abominations (thanks, @James), it pops up from time to time in questions and answers, such as our site's Prime Post.

However, I no longer see all of the Cthulu font on that page; most of it has been replaced by the notdef glyph, which on my system registers as a rectangle. I do see it in Firefox (v61.0.1), but not in Chrome (v68.0.3440) any more. Both of these are on Ubuntu 16.04.

Anyone have any ideas what is going on with Chrome and the Script of Madness?

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    I still see it as Script of Madness on Chrome. – Bellerophon Aug 27 at 18:05
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    I have the same problem. All Zalgo text is misrepresented for me. Also on chrome, also on Ubuntu. Likely that combination is the key. – Mike Nichols Aug 27 at 20:30
up vote 4 down vote

The thing you mean is called Zalgo text (or various variations of that word combination).

And it seems to be y̩̠̻͔o̫̭̖̞͈͡u̩͔̠͓. Because it's work̢̳͕i̘n̦g̘͎͙ for me (Same Chrome Version, 64bit, Win10).

A little explanation on how it works (simplified):

Th̹e̫̦̤ s̢̥͍cript is making use o̘̠̙̗͜f Unicode-Com̪bining-Characters that move thi͙͈̥̳̬͎n̤͈̟g̦̖̫s f̭͇ͅǫ̭͈̙̖llowing that symbol somewher͈e relative to the preceding letter. This is usually͇̙̱͉̳ used to̧͖̻͉̰ form more complex characters or letters that e.g. are not in the normal U̫̻͉͝nicode character set used.

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    A̵̰͈̍͛g̴̣̺̅̿r̵͕͐̈́è̶̼͈͔ë̶̤̻̫́d̷̨́̆̈. – FoxElemental Aug 27 at 18:16
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    That Zalgo text link, in chrome, gave me an option to "translate this page." I said no. You can thank me later when Cthulu doesn't eat you. – kingledion Aug 27 at 18:17
  • Also, I should point out that I am in Ubuntu 16.04. Are you on Linux? Windows? – kingledion Aug 27 at 18:17
  • @kingledion now we're getting somewhere; Windows10 here - what font(s) are you using? – dot_Sp0T Aug 27 at 18:25
  • Also, now this answer is probably useless but I don't wanna delete it because I put so much effort into the hidden message – dot_Sp0T Aug 27 at 18:26
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    No, this answer is useful to everyone like me, who never heard of Zalgo before. – Vincent Aug 27 at 22:46
up vote 1 down vote

So, it looks like there is a difference in rendering between Ubuntu and Windows, but I can't replicate your problem specifically.

I'm dual-booting Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10, and in Windows 10 I see the following:

Zalgo in Windows

AFAICS, it looks fine and just as it always has.

In Ubuntu, I get this:

Zalgo in Ubuntu 18

Which looks oddly compressed in some way. Admittedly, I'm not sure what the Prime Post looked like in Ubuntu before so can't confirm whether this is similar or different.

In both cases, I'm using Google Chrome (not Chromium) 68.0.3440.106. chrome://version output below:

Windows 10:

Google Chrome 68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)

Revision 1c32c539ce0065a41cb79da7bfcd2c71af1afe62-refs/branch- heads/3440@{#794}

OS Windows

JavaScript V8 6.8.275.26

Flash 30.0.0.154 C:\Users\willi\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash\30.0.0.154\pepflashplayer.dll

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36

Ubuntu 18.04.1:

Google Chrome 68.0.3440.106 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Revision 1c32c539ce0065a41cb79da7bfcd2c71af1afe62-refs/branch-heads/3440@{#794}

OS Linux

JavaScript V8 6.8.275.26

Flash 30.0.0.154 /home/wkumler/.config/google-chrome/PepperFlash/30.0.0.154/libpepflashplayer.so

User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36

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  • Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing. My wife's Windows 10 is rendering fine. Something with Ubuntu + Chrome, interesting. I'll have to try it at work with CentOS tomorrow and see if it is Ubuntu or Linux. – kingledion Aug 27 at 21:49

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