How this calculator works
The glitch effect is built from combining marks, which are Unicode characters drawn in the same cell as the letter before them. Overlaying a long stroke and a short stroke creates the scratched, corrupted look. Each visible character receives a fixed number of marks, cycling through a small set so the pattern does not depend on timing or randomness. Spaces and line breaks are skipped, which keeps the words legible. Because the marks are characters, the effect travels through copy and paste, but it also lengthens the string considerably and the result may not be readable by some screen readers.
Formula
For each non-whitespace character, append N combining marks from the cycle U+0336, U+0335, U+0337, U+0348, U+0353, U+035C, starting at the character position and wrapping around. N is 1 for light, 2 for medium and 4 for heavy. Whitespace is copied unchanged.
Worked example
The text corrupted signal at light intensity gets one mark per letter, so the c takes the first mark in the cycle, the o the second and so on. At heavy intensity each letter takes four marks, which produces a much denser band over the text while the original letters stay in place.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the output random each time?
No. The calculator uses a fixed cycle of combining marks and a deterministic count per character, so the same input and intensity always give the same output. That makes the result safe to preview and share.
Why do some characters look unchanged?
Whitespace is never marked, and a letter whose font does not support a combining mark may show the mark shifted or not at all. The text itself still contains the marks, so it may look different on another device.
Will a post count all those marks?
Often yes. Many platforms count combining marks as characters even though they take no horizontal space, so heavy glitch text can reach a character limit quickly. Use light intensity for long text.
Is glitch text accessible?
Not always. Screen readers may read each combining mark as a separate character or skip them, so a message built entirely from glitch text can be hard to understand. Keep the essential meaning in plain text as well.