
Shapecatcher - draw the unicode character you want - ChrisArchitect
http://shapecatcher.com/
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cypherpunks01
Similar visual search for LaTeX characters:
<http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html>

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reledi
First thing I thought of when I saw Shapecatcher was Detexify. The
similarities are obvious, it was most likely his true inspiration, or at least
part of it, yet he didn't mention in the about page.

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nhebb
I thought it said "unicorn". I was dismayed to find that my beautiful,
refrigerator-worthy rendering of a unicorn was interpreted as a few Arabic
characters, some arrows, and a domino tile.

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ansgri
Yet it knows USSR: ☭ recognized just fine.

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atldev
Great concept, but 1 for 5 in recognition. Matched dollar sign. No euro, no
pound, no ampersand, no pi? Maybe I'm a horrible artist, but 49 suggestions
(some that look like pi) and no pi?

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mkl
Another datapoint: I had no trouble with any of those.

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frobozz
Pi took me a couple of goes, and when I drew a somewhat narrow ampersand, it
gave me a few erroneous results.

Both were successful, and put the desired character at the top of the list.
All the others worked first time.

It would be excellent if it could be made to learn, with users being able to
say "that's what I meant"

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potatolicious
Am I the only one who tried "ಠ" and couldn't get it to work no matter what?

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seabee
I tried a snowman ☃ - it's pretty low on the list but you'll find it with a
crude but detailed drawing.

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rubinelli
The secret is adding the snowflakes.

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snorkel
Very cool. Would be useful to see a section of neighboring glyphs in the area
of a selected glyph (I want to find the spade suit and see some other suit
glyphs too)

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erikpukinskis
I was recently searching for a unicode Thumbs Up, and came up empty handed
(there is none). So I drew one in this thing, and got some useful
approximations at least:

ຢ ථ

I also came across this one, describe as "weary cat face":

🙀

Seriously, Unicode? You've got "weary cat face", but no thumbs up? I am
disappoint.

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ElbertF
<http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f44d/index.htm>

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hsmyers
I noticed that the second attempt had more accuracy than the first since I was
able to see a similar character (white rook) and then modify my crude drawing
to eliminate extra information that was adding white noise to the search. Nice
work!

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llimllib
I tried really to get the thumbs up character, but no luck:
<http://i.imgur.com/YoWFh.jpg>

Handy tool anyway :)

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ghc
Apparently it can't do chinese or Japanese characters.

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aculver
Agreed. I randomly tried イ, ア, 月, 四, and 行. It pulled back tons of results for
each of them, but not a single list contained the correct result.

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w1ntermute
Yeah, I encountered the same issue. The only thing I can think of is that I'm
drawing them in the handwritten style, but the recognizer probably needs them
to be in the digital font style.

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chromedude
This is top notch. Any chance you would make this so that you could embed it
in another website - maybe for a cost/month? because I can think of some sites
right now that could really use this.

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haridsv
Very useful, fun and even has research value. Draw a circle and find a lot of
emoticons. I couldn't find any of the letters from my mother tongue though,
hopefully they will be added.

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VMG
It is astonishing how many types of vertical dashes there are.

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josscrowcroft
This is cool! I'd love to look into using the recognising algo in a rewrite of
motion captcha. Similar concept.

Great site.

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mixmastamyk
Just used it tonight... encountered a letter psi 𝜓 in a recaptcha form and it
helped me find it. ;)

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thirsteh
Hundreds of people just checked to see if there was a Unicode character that
resembles a penis.

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Archio
This is a genius name. Sounds catchy, but still nails what the product
actually does.

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codezero
I'm drawing some seriously inappropriate things, and this site does not
disappoint.

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DavidTO1
Bookmarked! Wow, quite an amazing product. How long did it take you to
develop?

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ilamparithi
Great. Tried some Tamil characters. It was able to recognize most of them.

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hernan7
Couldn't get it to recognize the "look of disapproval" character :-(

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msmith
Did not recognize my unicode snowman, but it got pretty close: Ṏ Ổ ồ

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llimllib
I actually got the snowman as the 8th result when trying (and failing) to draw
the unicode character "pile of poo" U+1F44D: <http://i.imgur.com/VBvK6.jpg>

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yumraj
Great stuff, unfortunately it doesn't catch my Devnagri letters.

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train_robber
I got one right after 10-15 tries. <http://i.imgur.com/4SJsf.png>

But it does get almost all Malayalam letters I tried.

Awesome work.

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xenophanes
I tried drawing a lowercase 'a' twice, and it couldn't find it.

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unreal37
I tried drawing the symbol for pi 3 times, and in dozens of results did not
see the character for pi. Odd.

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llimllib
I got pi on the first try: <http://i.imgur.com/IPyn7.jpg>

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airlocksoftware
Very nice! It caught my terrible rendition of the interrobang.

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prototypef
I can't, for the life of me, draw and get it to recognize "ñ"

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benhoyt
Strange. Worked first time for me: <http://i.imgur.com/JD2qb.png>

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ricardobeat
Touch support would be nice to have.

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swatkat
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208967>

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verroq
When that link was posted, the site was non-operational.

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NanoWar
⚛ Jimmy Neutron! ⚛

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lubujackson
This is amazing.

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dbbo
I tried some astronomical symbols, like ♃, but they don't seem to be supported
yet.

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wladimir
One of the first things I tried was Mercury ☿ and it did work (even first
match) - and that's despite my drawing skill.

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dbbo
Interesting. I actually tried a few different variations of Jupiter's symbol
(like making the curve more or less exaggerated, higher and lower, etc.) and
couldn't get it to work.

