Happy Birthday in Cursive

Happy Birthday runs 13 letters — 3 vowels against 10 consonants — and Cursive restyles every one of them above, each with its own permanent code point. The rarest letter in Happy Birthday is B — only 6 of the 26 English letters are used less often.

Spelled over the radio, Happy Birthday would begin "Hotel"; on a Scrabble rack its letters would add up to 32 points.

ℋ𝒶𝓅𝓅𝓎 ℬ𝒾𝓇𝓉𝒽𝒹𝒶𝓎 — the whole of Happy Birthday, ready to copy from the card at the top.

Paste cursive Happy Birthday into a field with a character limit and it may measure 13 or 24, depending on how that app counts. Neither number is wrong; apps that count code points see 13, apps that count UTF-16 units see 24.

The gap comes from where the letters live. ℋ (H, U+210B) and ℬ (B, U+212C) come from a different block than the rest of Happy Birthday. Unicode does not encode a character twice, and these eleven script letters already had homes in Letterlike Symbols, so the Mathematical Alphanumeric Supplement was drawn with gaps where they would have gone.

The handwritten form of Happy Birthday is defined by what rises and falls out of the x-height: h, b, t and d reach above the top line, p and y drop below the baseline and b finishes high, so the join into the next letter comes down from above. None of that motion survives copying — each character arrives finished, so the letters stand apart rather than running together.