
Unicode Character Recognition - pixelcort
http://www.shapecatcher.com/
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ohkine
This looks fairly promising, but it's not there yet. For example, try drawing
a capital sigma ( Σ ); if you don't get your top and bottom bars perfectly
parallel there's a strong chance you'll get gibberish back. Or try pi ( π or Π
); a 1° change in the angle of your bars might make the difference between a
handful of relevant results and a full page of nonsensical Devanagari and
Gurmukhi characters. Or do a double dagger ( ‡ ); if your middle bar isn't
perfectly straight up and down it might think you're doing cent ( ¢ ) or
integral ( ∫ ). It seems like it's extremely difficult to get the same results
for the same 'search' — every time you get wildly different answers because
the slightest little difference in how you draw it changes how it reads it.

So i think the recognition algorithm needs a little work. I know you mentioned
font limitations, so i suspect adding more of those would be a good start.

Also, i don't see Japanese support, which is unfortunate. If you could get
that working i would be an instant fan. (I deal with transcription of Japanese
a lot, and although i'm proficient in kana, my kanji skills are pretty poor
and probably always will be. What i've always wanted is a tool that can return
kanji characters based on a drawing WITHOUT requiring strict adherence to
stroke order. That last requirement rules out every single tool i've found...)

Anyway good luck!

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xtacy
I am getting an error.

This reminds me of a very useful project, Detexify:
<http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html>

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haldean
Ditto, on both counts. I think we crashed it.

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tricolon
Yup, I get Error: error.

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stefankendall
shapecatcher.com works, www.shapecatcher.com does not.

The ajax urls are borked.

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ninjin
Love the idea, thought the same thing after having seen detexify and doing web
development looking for suitable Unicode glyphs (glyph lists are a pain in
the, well...). Keep it up and by all means fix the current error. ;)

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stefankendall
This only works if you go to the base URL: shapecatcher.com instead of
www.shapecatcher.com

Someone done goofed with the ajax.

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pixelcort
Disclaimer: Someone else made this; I just posted it to HN.

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brianobush
fails horribly with any Chinese or Japanese (tested Kanji and hiragana)
characters.

