RE: visual glyph search

From: Chris Weber (chris@casabasecurity.com)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2011 - 02:23:25 CST

  • Next message: Andrew West: "Re: visual glyph search"

    I would normally use Babelmap instead of browsing the collation maps, but those are helpful, thank you Peter. That's right Jukka, when I saw Detexify at http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html I thought how useful something like it could be for visually finding Unicode characters, identifying confusables, and maybe other uses. For example, someone sent me this symbol (attached as an image) and not recognizing it I wondered if it might be a legitimate script and also if it might exist in Unicode. Without the character to derive the code point from I suppose there’s no other way to tell other than to look through the collation tables. With something like Detexify I could draw the character as I see it, and it would return characters that look similar or share some of the same visual characteristics.

     

     

     

     

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Jukka K. Korpela
    Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 10:13 PM
    To: 'Unicode'
    Subject: Re: visual glyph search

     

    Peter Constable wrote:

     

    > The collation charts are helpful for some situations:

    >

    > <http://www.unicode.org/charts/collation/> http://www.unicode.org/charts/collation/

     

    Yes, but I think Chris Weber was up to something else when he wrote:

     

    > Does anyone know of a visual search tool for Unicode characters?

    > Something similar to <http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html> http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html?

     

    That tool lets you draw, by hand (mouse), a glyph and then recognizes what symbol it might be. It’s a pretty cool tool, but it’s limited to symbols (whatever that might be—letters are apparently excluded, as e.g. my draw of the diameter sign resulted in a suggestion of a few symbols, including the diameter sign, but excluding the letter ø). Moreover, it recognizes drawn characters. I tried to copy and paste a character there but just managed to crash Firefox.

      

    --
Yucca,  <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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