Glitch text to copy and paste

Both styles draw on the same set of marks; the difference is how many. Glitch gives almost every letter exactly one mark above and one below, so the word wobbles but stays readable. Zalgo gives each letter anywhere from one to six above and the same number below, and the letters sink under the pile. Since every mark is a character, the text gets much longer than it looks:

The marks aren’t random, either. They’re picked by where each character falls in the text, counting everything except spaces, not by which letter it is, so the same text always comes out the same way. Swap one letter for another, or add a space, and the marks stay put; add or remove any other character and every mark after it changes.

When software really mangles text, it rarely stacks marks. The usual fault is mojibake: text saved in one encoding and opened in another. An é turns into é, a curly apostrophe into ’, and characters that can’t be decoded at all become �, the replacement character. Missing fonts show up as empty boxes instead.

Glitch text is the horror-film version of that. For a broken look closer to the real thing, a word like café typed by hand can be funnier than a pile of marks, and it stays readable.

• Halloween posts, scary stories and creepy captions, where the broken letters set the mood.
• Gaming clips: lag, a crash, a lost round or a game-over screen.
• Teasers for a launch or an event, such as a glitched “something is coming” the day before the reveal.
• Jokes about a bad day or a tired brain, where the text itself looks like it’s giving up.

It doesn’t belong anywhere people need to read carefully: replies to customers, prices, dates, links, instructions or your name. A glitched word is hard to find by searching for it, and screen readers may read out the marks, skip the word or spell it letter by letter.

• Let one word carry the effect: “Monday morning, s̖̍ỷ̭s͎̉t̖̉ë̖́m̖̀ ë̖́r͎̈́r̖̍o̖̍r̺̉” lands better than a fully glitched sentence.
• Glitch the word people should feel, not the one they need. In “Haunted house tour, Saturday 8pm”, glitch “haunted” and leave the day and time alone.
• Put a plain version of anything important on the next line, so search and screen readers get the words too.
• Look at the post on a second phone. Each system positions marks its own way, so a light flicker on yours can look heavier on someone else’s.

Copy-and-paste glitch only works where text is text. For a glitched title on a Reel, a thumbnail or a poster, use a glitch effect in a video or photo editor instead. Those effects split colours, shake the letters and add scan lines, and they can move, which pasted characters can’t.