That mysterious J

The mystery of J

Alex Barnett blog — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:24:34 GMT

Raymond sheds some light on the mystery of J.

re: That mysterious J

josh — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:29:11 GMT

Then there's also that Gecko renders it as a J (except specifically for "font face" in quirks mode, like what you used...) because it stubbornly insists that there IS no "J" in Wingdings and goes off to find a font that does have it.

What does J mean?

Jaanus on the internet — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:31:10 GMT

What is a J? A letter in the alphabet, yes, no, yes? Well sometimes it&#8217;s a bit more than that, or rather, something different. Have you ever got emails like this and wondered what the HELL is that J? I&#8217;ve...

re: That mysterious J

Dave — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:42:39 GMT

This is such a coincidence! My wife asked me just last night what the letter J was doing in an email she was reading!! Raymond must have psychic abilities!

re: That mysterious J

robdoyle — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:44:21 GMT

Jay!!1one!

re: That mysterious J

Sean.McLellan — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:45:40 GMT

That's so cool!!!!1111oneoneone JJJ

re: That mysterious J

Centaur — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:46:59 GMT

Since I do not allow web sites to override my browsing font, I can see the Unicode smiley but not the Windings one.

re: That mysterious J

James Schend — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:49:15 GMT

True experts will do:

1337!!!!one1!!one!eleven!!!!

re: That mysterious J

BryanK — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:56:36 GMT

James -- I've even seen something like:

OMG!!!11!one1!eleven1onehundredandeleven!11

(And once in a while, even bigger numbers, though in that case they rarely do the "progression".) Generally that's at userfriendly, although I would bet that it happens elsewhere too.

re: That mysterious J

Nekto2 — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:15:50 GMT

o o | \_/

re: That mysterious J

Caliban Darklock — Tue, 23 May 2006 20:38:18 GMT

That is SO thirteenthreeseven.

Which is oddly enough the only reasonably cool way to say that.

You can't say thirteenthirtyseven because that might be a thirty followed by a seven. You can't say thirteenthirty-seven because it might word wrap. And onethousandthreehundredthirtyseven is just too damn long.

Besides, thirteen is a cool number, and thirteen plus three plus seven is 23 which is a tremendously cool number. Thirteen plus thirty-seven is fifty, which is not cool at all unless you pronounce it "fitty", and even then it's nowhere near as cool as 23.

I frequently use the number 1638 as a "magic" constant, but nobody ever knows why until they happen to see it pop up in a debugger's watch window.

re: That mysterious J

Julio Nobrega — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:31:28 GMT

Yeah, the exclamation points :)

A lot of people use them as Peter's "-ly y'rs", putting a summary of the message in between the characters.

re: That mysterious J

Noah Richards — Tue, 23 May 2006 23:57:43 GMT

The "1"s and "one"s at the end of exclamation points are not making fun of l33t; they are making fun of the girls in middle-school who get so excited that they hold down the exclamation point (shift+1) at the end of each sentence, but accidentally let up on the shift key too early. Hence the effect: "I <3 U!!!!!!1".

re: That mysterious J

Revenant — Wed, 24 May 2006 02:55:53 GMT

I've also seen a row of exclamation marks like so:

OMG!!!11!one1!elevenfactorial!11

Don't you love it when maths geeks take the piss?

re: That mysterious J

Scott — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:11:16 GMT

Some versions of Messenger use "(au)" (stands for Auto) as an emoticon for a car.

It's now common among some of my friends to simply use "au" to indicate which one of is driving. If we're feeling especially cryptic, we'll just use "gold".

re: That mysterious J

Wed, 24 May 2006 10:24:26 GMT

It is all a lie. I never smile.

re: That mysterious J

Matthew — Wed, 24 May 2006 12:56:15 GMT

Gecko is quite correct. There is no J in Wingdings. Using J and specifying font Wingdings should not result in a smily face, as under font substitution rules if the requested glyph (a J) is not found, it should use a font that does have it. You can't simply say 'use the letter in the same "position" as J would be'. You should of course use the unicode for a smily. <font face=Wingdings>J</font> is a Microsoft hack that unfortunately has never been corrected.

Just totally wrong, and contrary to standards

re: That mysterious J

ender — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:08:13 GMT

Speaking of e-mails, why do some versions of Outlook put the word "Message" (localised in non-English versions) at the start of plain-text version of messages (when the message is sent as HTML)?

re: That mysterious J

Sudsy — Wed, 24 May 2006 16:47:44 GMT

That explains how J Allard got his name.

re: That mysterious J

Stu — Wed, 24 May 2006 17:57:27 GMT

I suppose this is an artifact of Microsoft employees using Word as their email editor in Outlook?
Word automatically substitutes a wingdings smiley face when you type :) or :-) by default.

re: That mysterious J

RussN — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:09:21 GMT

Is it not interesting how devices influence culture?

I have seen people mocking 'leet' speak by using cos(0) and sin(pi/2) in a large exclamation mark/1 string, e.g. "I m 1337!!!!111cos(0)!111!!sin(pi/2)"

re: That mysterious J

Jepp — Wed, 24 May 2006 18:28:54 GMT

Thanks, that solves a long running mystery.

re: That mysterious J

Neil — Thu, 25 May 2006 12:10:19 GMT

J39916800

re: That mysterious J

oldnewthing — Thu, 25 May 2006 18:01:26 GMT

Ender: Why not ask the Outlook team?

re: That mysterious J

Jonathan — Thu, 25 May 2006 23:12:33 GMT

Re: Gecko displaying a J anyways:

I'm not an expert in fonts, but how does Gecko know that Wingdings doesn't contain a J? Wingding's J just looks a lot different (like a smiley). Does Gecko call some Windows font API that says Wingdings is a symbol font and thus you shouldn't use it?

re: That mysterious J - How to type unicode chars??

Fri, 26 May 2006 15:30:45 GMT

Anybody knows how to type those unicode chars,
I can type é by typing alt-0233 (numpad), but I get stuck when non-numeric chars come into play. Like the ☺ (alt-263A fails - so charmap helped me out here, but I'd like a faster way)

re: That mysterious J - How to type unicode chars??

Matt Nordhoff — Mon, 29 May 2006 00:39:16 GMT

263A was hexadecimal, hence the x before it. 9786 is equivalent to it, try that.

(Two days late, so this is probably pointless to post, but...)

re: That mysterious J

Christopher Vaughan [MSFT] — Mon, 29 May 2006 05:12:36 GMT

This hit us on the IE blog back in one of our very first posts. Tony Chor (my boss and the IE team GPM) put a smiley in his post to convey sarcasm but it posted as a 'J' which seemed to rile up our readers to no end as they now took Tony to be serious.

We have since learned our lesson, and we now completely abstain from all attemps at humor in our posts J

-Christopher

re: That mysterious J

Madis Kalme — Mon, 29 May 2006 12:58:05 GMT

With Mozilla family, if you select the smiley and right-click on it - you will be prompted for "Search web for J".
With the UNICODE one, you will be prompted to search for smiley-face, but Google thinks its an empty character and doesn't return any results.
Hmm...interesting

re: That mysterious J

BryanK — Tue, 30 May 2006 18:10:43 GMT

> if you select the smiley and right-click on it - you will be prompted for "Search web for J".

I would guess that happens because the font used in the popup menu is not wingdings. Therefore, inserting the UTF-16 value 0x004A into a menu whose font shows that code-point as a "J" glyph will display a "J" glyph. Likewise with the Unicode smiley-face symbol -- the font used in the menu has a glyph for that code-point, which looks like a smiley-face (as it should).

This *may* also be the reason some Mozilla browsers show the J as a J; perhaps they don't use the Wingdings font for some reason. Though I don't know for sure. (It's even possible that the wingdings font-family is blacklisted for everything except <font face=> tags in quirks mode, though I don't know if it is.)

(I do know that this is why overloading character values in a font is not a good idea -- those code points have assigned meanings, and I believe assigned glyphs also. If one user doesn't have your font installed in one place, or your font isn't used for *every* string that comes from you, then your user will get confused.)

As for putting smileys into text -- I would assume that ;-) or :-) or any of the hundred variations on that theme would work much better than a solution that requires a certain font face to be present in all browsers...

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