Here are updates to two of my free text utilities, Dystextia and Apfelstrudel.

Dystextia encodes and decodes Latin/Roman Unicode text into ‘spoofed’ or obfuscated Unicode characters which humans can read quite comfortably, but which use unusual code points. I originally wrote this to demonstrate how serious this problem is, but then realised that it’s a very good way of generating text which can’t easily be recognised, searched, or parsed in code. For most text-based systems it appears completely incomprehensible.

Version 1.6 of Dystextia now has a brief Help book, checks its own code integrity when it launches, and will alert you of future updates, offering to download them for you. It’s available from here: dystextia16
from Downloads above, and from its product page.

Apfelstrudel is a utility which I wrote in the early days of APFS, which it didn’t accommodate the normalisation required of HFS+ file and folder names. Enter a string of text and it will show you each of its Unicode normalised forms and the results of comparing normalised and non-normalised strings. If you work with non-English text, this can be extremely helpful.

Apfelstrudel 1.3 now includes checks its own code integrity when it launches, and will alert you of future updates, offering to download them for you. It’s available from here: apfelstrudel13
from Downloads above, and from its product page.