Fonts without Fonts - ASCII subsets

Reading through my daily news, I noticed an article that had a different font than the others in the header:

Tabs in Firefox, one with an apparently different font

I wondered if it might be some cool new thing that Firefox was allowing, so I investigated further. (Yes, I jumped onto the FF bandwagon. I'm still undecided.) What I found baffled me. There was no special font applied, and the "font" was present even in the code inspector, even when I copied it!

Double-Stuck text visible in Firefox Inspector

Look, even now, it's like magic: 𝔹𝕝𝕦𝕣𝕣𝕖𝕕 𝕀𝕞𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕤.

The only thing I could think of was unicode characters, so I dug around a bit, and found that, yes, it is using a subset of characters in unicode called [Double-Struck][double-struck]. As it turns out, there are a number of these subsets that can be used. You might recall the upside-down text craze a year or two ago;

ssǝupɐɯ

In any case, from there, it was only one more search to find a way to generate my own text of this kind. Check out this handy conversion tool!

That's all, nothing huge, but it's pretty cool to know, and fun to play around with. Enjoy!