
Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - barredo
http://shapecatcher.com/
======
Hupo
Couldn't get it to find the unicode snowman[1]:
<http://i.imgur.com/gaIY9Gd.png> (my drawing skills are awesome, no?)

But that aside, this looks like a neat idea. Not something I have any
immediate use for myself, but could certainly be useful in some situations.

[1] <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2603/index.htm>

~~~
wmil
I can't get it to recognize 'Pile of Poo' (U+1F4A9)

Major bug.

~~~
dschep
worked for me: <http://i.imgur.com/4EJhUpK.png>

~~~
cdcarter
And indeed, a MiniDisc is a pile of poo (and Sony end of lifed them today!)

------
rryan
Along these same lines, for LaTeX fans there is
<http://detexify.kirelabs.org/>

------
seanp2k2
For the curious, this explains a lot of the science in a hands-on,
approachable way: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10168686/algorithm-
improv...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10168686/algorithm-improvement-
for-coca-cola-can-shape-recognition)

EDIT: As this is a deep topic, there are also books if that's more your style:
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0123725380/?tag=stackoverfl08-20>

or maybe you like Wikipedia (Ol' Trusty):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_detection_(computer_vis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_detection_\(computer_vision\))

~~~
quirm
and for the very curious, my bachelor thesis is on shapecatcher,
[http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20...](http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20Of%20reCAPTCHA%20-%20Bachelor%20Thesis.pdf)

There is a whole chapter on shape contexts in it, which I use with
shapecatcher, too.

------
rurounijones
Damn that looks good, it worked for me for ② and u with umlauts.

Get the Japanese support in there and it will be amazing. What about using MS
Mincho or MS Gothic for that? (It is free as in beer, but is the licensing
off?)

------
andydrizen
If you like this, see DeTeXify <http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html>

------
uvdiv
My simple, clean ampersand (&) became a paperclip (0x1f4ce), a "fried shrimp"
(0x1f364), several species of geometric triangle, and dozens of other silly,
silly glyphs.

<http://i.imgur.com/NLkl75J.png>

the unicode block containing "fried shrimp" 0x1f364 -- why does this exist???

<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf>

Latest _Abstruse Goose_ comic sums up my emotional response:

<http://abstrusegoose.com/496>

~~~
nwh
Who doesn't love 🍤?

There's lot of other strange Unicode too. There's things like '⁢' (U2062
INVISIBLE TIMES), ⓞⓓⓓ ©ⓗⓐⓡⓐ©ⓣⓔⓡ ⓢⓔⓣⓢ and sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ uʍop ǝpısdn.

All of which can be used to bypass filters and generally cause browser-
crashing havoc. For example, this address looks like Google, but it really
links to hacker news.

‮<http://news.ycombinator.com/?/moc.elgoog//:ptth>

~~~
uvdiv
_Who doesn't love 🍤?_

I just discovered the OS X terminal renders the friend shrimp glyph in
_color!_

edit: and it's now my $PS1.

~~~
speeder
Yes, I tested pasting "🍤" to my OSX, and was surprised by a color rendering of
a friend shrimp.

(yes, you can copy the character between "" and paste in your OSX terminal)

~~~
decad
Shame this doesn't work in zsh.

~~~
uvdiv
Why wouldn't it work on zsh? The font face is a property of the terminal
emulator (e.g. xterm, Terminal.app), not the shell.

<http://i.imgur.com/RKTOBKe.png>

edit: It appears (?) stock linux fonts don't include emoji.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Very nice and amazingly accurate. But am I using your website the right way?
When I look through the characters in the search results, if I see one that
isn't rendering on my computer and just has a block instead of the symbol.
I've been clicking on "bad" for "rate this suggestion". Thinking that it
tallies up the total good/bad for a character to mean "how likely people are
to have this character installed and working on their computers".

However, I now have a feeling that's not what that feature is for.

~~~
kayge
My guess was that the Good/Bad rating is to help with some sort of Machine
Learning going on the background. E.g. the way I draw my Ampersand might be
slightly different than yours, so if either or both of us see the result we
were hoping for (&), that should get our Good rating. If it returns an (8), it
may or may not deserve a Bad. If something way off appears as a top result
(^), that would be pretty Bad.

------
adnam
It recognized my drawing of a cactus! <http://i.imgur.com/pDgIOPk.png>

~~~
speeder
I know this is supposed to be funny, but I had to flag it.

I mean, I did found it funny, but I did not enjoyed seeing that in my work
(specially because I work with kids stuff)

~~~
adnam
Are cacti considered dangerous for children in your country?

~~~
jessaustin
Cacti are dangerous to children and adults wherever they appear. Those thorns
are sharp! :)

------
seanp2k2
Found a "secret" <http://shapecatcher.com/engine/>

------
jaymzcampbell
Reminds me of the excellent Detexify, which serves a similar purpose but for
LaTeX symbols: <http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html>

------
symmetricsaurus
Tried to draw an alpha but it didn't get it.

So far I haven't tried Shapecatcher a lot but I think that
<http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html> works much better. Detexify is of
course only for LaTeX symbols and doesn't do unicode.

To be useful Shapecatcher needs to become better at recognition.

------
cygwin98
Nice job done. Here are what I got: ᗧ ᗣ ᗤ ᗢ

could be awesome for a character-based PacMan impl.

------
drucken
_"If you can't find Chinese, Japanese or Korean glyphs, it is because I have
yet to find a good free CJK font to use."_

Are there not some CJK (or otherwise) fonts from, for example, Linux
distributions that could have been used?

Or perhaps the emphasis could be on clarifying what is meant by "good" that
deserves excluding such a large and useful character space for this type of
application?

------
smcl
Sounds cool but sadly hasn't worked for the letters I often need but haven't
easy access to (czech characters like: ř, ď and š). Perhaps because the
element that makes them distinct from the latin (the "haček") is so tiny.

Edit, I just drew the ř larger and it recognised it correctly. Cool :)

------
k_bx
(surprisingly noone said this) Too bad it doesn't generate links to drawing
results.

~~~
jessaustin
Hosting uploaded images exposes sites to a great deal of annoyance.

~~~
quirm
I think there is away to not host images - I could just record strokes and
play that back with js.

------
fredley
Trying to draw U+1F4A9 (Pile of Poo). After several attempts, no luck.

I have learnt that Unicode contains even more weirdness than I thought before
though, including 'Alchemical symbol for borax-3' (U+1f744), and 'doughnut'
(U+1f369).

~~~
zenon
I tried to draw the elusive snowman: <http://i.imgur.com/dr5VKTh.png>

Clearly it's not impressed by my drawing skills.

------
speeder
Nice idea, too bad that I tried to draw several variations of PI, and it
showed me several interesting characters, but never a PI.

Seriously, it even showed some very PI-like things, but not PI itself. This is
a downer.

------
the_gipsy
Idea: instead of matching the shape of what the user has drawn raster-wise,
let the user draw an svg-like path, and try to identify the letter by the
trace.

~~~
seanp2k2
Agreed that a pen tool or some type of editor would be kind of nice, but for
what he's going for (proving out an idea), this is still pretty fun. I know a
little of the science behind it, but it'd be great to read through some well-
commented source code. He did link in the thesis on this, however:
[http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20...](http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20Of%20reCAPTCHA%20-%20Bachelor%20Thesis.pdf)

------
oftenwrong
Related:

A version of this for kanji that is very accurate

<http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw-canvas.html>

------
a_p
Does anyone know if the mirror image of this character: “ (U+201C) exists? I'm
looking for a character that is the mirror image of the left double quotation
mark, where the base is on the bottom and the character tapers from bottom
right to top left. I don't know if any languages use that character.

~~~
FreeFull
‟ (U+201F) possibly?

------
anonymfus
Interesting thing, it recognized white queen correctly with diamonds on crown,
but as black queen without diamonds and failed with only one diamond:

<http://i45.tinypic.com/3535j4x.png> — screenshot of variant with three
diamonds.

------
quasque
Pretty neat, but I'm not sure what else it wants me to draw here
<http://i.imgur.com/rfU10rj.png>

Also it seems to fail on badly-drawn birds <http://i.imgur.com/IZgrRkq.png>

~~~
quirm
1) it does count edge pixels - recognition is based on the shape of what you
draw, so for the algorithm, a black picture is like a white one (but I admire
your endurance to paint it all black) 2) server is under heavy load atm, it
might drop some requests - just retry

------
RyanMcGreal
Sadly it didn't recognize my clumsy attempt to draw the Look of Disapproval:
<http://i.imgur.com/0lvPFaJ.png>

On the upside, I learned that there is a Panda Face unicode character.

~~~
niyazpk
The look of disapproval is not a single character; it comprises of three
characters: [1] _ [1]

[1] <http://shapecatcher.com/unicode/info/3232>

------
rmrfrmrf
Really cool stuff. Luckily, I draw my lowercase 'a's in double-story form, but
if you attempt to draw an a (or an accented a) with just a circle and a line,
it's recognized as an 'o'.

------
eoJ
Nice. It's not very good at finding faces though. The right face is there, but
way down.

<http://i.imgur.com/PD1DkV6.png>

------
zandomatter
Really cool. The drawing tool would be even better if it drew as soon as you
clicked (i.e., would draw a single dot if you click and don't drag the mouse).

------
lucb1e
It didn't recognize the capital letter A, only variations on the letter A and
other unknown characters. I'm sure that the letter A is an unicode character!

~~~
Blara
Worked for me, it's called: Latin capital letter a: A (0x41)

------
JoeAltmaier
Doesn't seem to include the drawing stroke order or anything, just the
ultimate image. I guess if you know the strokes, you know the letter already,
hm.

~~~
martinced
Are strokes order available for Unicode codepoints? I know that for many
languages they're not important (for example people are free to write 't' from
top-to-bottom but from bottom-to-top too) while in others stroke order is very
important, like in Japanese.

However how would stroke order work for a Unicode codepoint? If it exists,
there has to be a _lot_ of info in addition to the codepoint of, say, a kanji.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
It claims Chinese/Japanese/Korean is unsupported, but works fine for me:

<http://i.imgur.com/AQBybDT.png>

~~~
bryze
Is that the only character you tried? Try writing "論" and see what happens..

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I tried 四 and it didn't work. I guess Hiragana and Katakana work, but not
Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja.

~~~
quirm
Right. Hiragana and Katakana ist trivial (just a couple of characters), but no
support for Kanjis currently

------
tempestn
Awesome idea, but all it ever gives me is a loading bar.
shapecatcher.com/engine/recognize eventually returns "504 Gateway Time-out"

------
mikle
It did pretty well with the first five Hebrew letters. Pretty well as in all
but one was found in the top 10 of results.

------
kaolinite
Worked really well for me, found a smiley face and a few accented characters.
Awesome idea and implementation.

------
SeanDav
Couldn't get it to recognize my drawing of a castle/rook in chess, but it did
find my bishop. Great site.

------
thewarrior
They need to prioritise the glyphs based on frequency of occurrence to prevent
ridiculous matches.

~~~
neumann_alfred
You can rate the recognition results ;)

------
cynwoody
It got the ⌘-sign on the first try (Place of interest sign: 0x2318, aka the
Command Key).

------
nefasti
I clicked the link reading "Draw the Unicorn character you want" =(

------
sparist
Worked fantastically on my iPad. Excellent idea and execution.

------
miga
Well, it didn't recognize pi.

------
JoeAltmaier
Amazing. Try a happy face!

------
Snoptic
2 previous discussions.

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Sha...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Shapecatcher&start=0)

Maybe the author can write a post detector next.

