Supercombiner

The supercombiner is the letter "u" combined with the first hundred combining diacritic characters in Unicode.

This should render as a "u" with lots of diacritics above and below it in a large stack, but since this is a pretty difficult rendering challenge, many programs of course get it wrong.

Browser Rendering	Reference Rendering
ừ̴̵̶̷̸̡̢̧̨̖̗̘̙̜̝̞̟̠̣̤̥̦̩̪̫̬̭̮̯̰̱̲̳̹̺̻̼͇͈͉͍͎́̂̃̄̅̆̇̈̉̊̋̌̍̎̏̐̑̒̓̔̽̾̿̀́͂̓̈́͆͊͋͌̕̚ͅ͏͓͔͕͖͙͚͐͑͒͗͛ͣ͘͜͟͢͝͞͠͡

Mozilla Bug 403464 (alias, supercombiner) was the first major incorrect rendering of the supercombiner to be submitted, by Justin Dolske on 12th November 2007. The case had been mentioned to him by my friend Pat Hall, who saw it as a great Unicode smoke test.

Errors

Firefox and Safari failed spectacularly when the original Mozilla Bug was filed.

One of the best supercombiner errors came in writing this page. I accidentally deleted the last few combining characters of the supercombiner, and when I tried to use the Undo function in TextWrangler, it complained with "(MacOS Error code: -116)", i.e. Size Check failed, and simply wouldn't restore the diacritics.

In Google Chrome 5.0.375.99 the supercombiner renders correctly when a sans-serif font-face is used, but not when serif is used.

References

First used on 18th September 2007. I almost got vertical Unicode in X-Chat Aqua, but Björn Höhrmann got horizontal mojibake in his IRC client.
Pat's Gaim screenshot for the Mozilla bug, 12th November 2007, shows Gaim failing on it pretty badly.
Adam tried it in irssi on 14th December 2007, and the results were worse than one might expect even from irssi.
Mentioned in WHAT WG logs for 24th January 2009.
Cody tweeted it on 23rd June 2010.
David P. Kendal found that it does not work in Textual, filed as Issue #337, on 27th August 2012.

Source

Created with the following python code:

s = 'u'
for i in xrange(1, 3000): 
   if unicodedata.category(unichr(i)) == 'Mn': 
      s += unichr(i)
   if len(s) > 100: break

There are also Linux and OS X clipboard / pasteboard scripts.

Messages for Mac gives some weird errors: (a), (b), (c)

Characters Used

LATIN SMALL LETTER U
COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT
COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT
COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
COMBINING TILDE
COMBINING MACRON
COMBINING OVERLINE
COMBINING BREVE
COMBINING DOT ABOVE
COMBINING DIAERESIS
COMBINING HOOK ABOVE
COMBINING RING ABOVE
COMBINING DOUBLE ACUTE ACCENT
COMBINING CARON
COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE
COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE ABOVE
COMBINING DOUBLE GRAVE ACCENT
COMBINING CANDRABINDU
COMBINING INVERTED BREVE
COMBINING TURNED COMMA ABOVE
COMBINING COMMA ABOVE
COMBINING REVERSED COMMA ABOVE
COMBINING COMMA ABOVE RIGHT
COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT BELOW
COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT BELOW
COMBINING LEFT TACK BELOW
COMBINING RIGHT TACK BELOW
COMBINING LEFT ANGLE ABOVE
COMBINING HORN
COMBINING LEFT HALF RING BELOW
COMBINING UP TACK BELOW
COMBINING DOWN TACK BELOW
COMBINING PLUS SIGN BELOW
COMBINING MINUS SIGN BELOW
COMBINING PALATALIZED HOOK BELOW
COMBINING RETROFLEX HOOK BELOW
COMBINING DOT BELOW
COMBINING DIAERESIS BELOW
COMBINING RING BELOW
COMBINING COMMA BELOW
COMBINING CEDILLA
COMBINING OGONEK
COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW
COMBINING BRIDGE BELOW
COMBINING INVERTED DOUBLE ARCH BELOW
COMBINING CARON BELOW
COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT BELOW
COMBINING BREVE BELOW
COMBINING INVERTED BREVE BELOW
COMBINING TILDE BELOW
COMBINING MACRON BELOW

COMBINING LOW LINE
COMBINING DOUBLE LOW LINE
COMBINING TILDE OVERLAY
COMBINING SHORT STROKE OVERLAY
COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY
COMBINING SHORT SOLIDUS OVERLAY
COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY
COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING BELOW
COMBINING INVERTED BRIDGE BELOW
COMBINING SQUARE BELOW
COMBINING SEAGULL BELOW
COMBINING X ABOVE
COMBINING VERTICAL TILDE
COMBINING DOUBLE OVERLINE
COMBINING GRAVE TONE MARK
COMBINING ACUTE TONE MARK
COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI
COMBINING GREEK KORONIS
COMBINING GREEK DIALYTIKA TONOS
COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI
COMBINING BRIDGE ABOVE
COMBINING EQUALS SIGN BELOW
COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE BELOW
COMBINING LEFT ANGLE BELOW
COMBINING NOT TILDE ABOVE
COMBINING HOMOTHETIC ABOVE
COMBINING ALMOST EQUAL TO ABOVE
COMBINING LEFT RIGHT ARROW BELOW
COMBINING UPWARDS ARROW BELOW
COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER
COMBINING RIGHT ARROWHEAD ABOVE
COMBINING LEFT HALF RING ABOVE
COMBINING FERMATA
COMBINING X BELOW
COMBINING LEFT ARROWHEAD BELOW
COMBINING RIGHT ARROWHEAD BELOW
COMBINING RIGHT ARROWHEAD AND UP ARROWHEAD BELOW
COMBINING RIGHT HALF RING ABOVE
COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT
COMBINING ASTERISK BELOW
COMBINING DOUBLE RING BELOW
COMBINING ZIGZAG ABOVE
COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW
COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE
COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON
COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON BELOW
COMBINING DOUBLE TILDE
COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE
COMBINING DOUBLE RIGHTWARDS ARROW BELOW
COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER A

Sean B. Palmer · Updated 18 June 2012