

Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - nnnnni
http://shapecatcher.com

======
Springtime
What would perhaps be a worthwhile feature is the ability to input already
known unicode names into a text box after seeing the results, to feed the
database with more useful matches.

For example, tried drawing a somewhat joined 'TM' a couple times but no
matches for 'Trademark symbol', however a way to manually input that
unicode/name might provide the database with a positive match for the next
user trying to find it.

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drodgers
They didn't think to weight the prior probabilities by usage frequency* -
drawing a reasonable ? gives me ȓ, ᕉ, ╔, ᣑ, Ѓ, ק, ᒌ, ŕ, ᒤ, ᒦ, ņ, ᒯ, ѓ, and
finally ?.

I'm also guessing that they're directly comparing the handwritten character to
some version of the unicode character rather than with human attempts to draw
the character. Human drawings are often quite different (more slanted,
stylised etc.) than typeface characters. This is much more forgiveable though
because assembling a good dataset for human drawn characters is hard
(especially for any reasonable chunk of the unicode set).

(*this is fairly easy to do: just find some large source of typical unicode,
like Wikipedia in all languages, and index them).

~~~
yincrash
I just drew a question mark, and it showed up as the first result with a score
of 0.899462

~~~
nnnnni
Yeah, I just tried it with the inverted question mark (¿) _and_ interrobang
(‽) -- both attempts had the correct glyph for the first result.

Maybe we're training it?

~~~
dthunt
Probably not training "matching", given that there is no place where you
indicate what the correct thing was.

It could be gathering data about how people draw shapes in general, but it's
not immediately obvious to me how much that can help.

~~~
nacs
> given that there is no place where you indicate what the correct thing was.

Actually there is a "Good" and "Bad" voting feature for each result.

~~~
dthunt
Retracted then. I hadn't noticed that.

------
Flenser
Some other useful unicode websites:

[http://www.amp-what.com/](http://www.amp-what.com/)

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm)

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm)

(I've added the above as search engines in Chrome with short mnemonics for the
keyword.)

There's also:

[http://unicode.johnholtripley.co.uk/](http://unicode.johnholtripley.co.uk/)
\-- mobile unicode support tables

[http://unicodinator.com/](http://unicodinator.com/)

[http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode](http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode)
\-- emoji :D

[http://character-code.com/](http://character-code.com/)

[http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm](http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm)

and of course:

[http://copypastecharacter.com/](http://copypastecharacter.com/)

Want more unicode resources? There's a list of other resources here:

[http://joewlarson.com/blog/2014/01/01/useful-unicode-
resourc...](http://joewlarson.com/blog/2014/01/01/useful-unicode-resources/)

~~~
Flenser
Forgot to mention, I use this bookmarklet with amp-what to change the font to
Segoe UI Symbol as that often has more Unicode symbols and is the font used in
a lot of the places I tend to use unicode symbols.

    
    
          javascript:(function(){var newcss="samp { font-family: Segoe UI Symbol; }";if("\v"=="v"){document.createStyleSheet().cssText=newcss}else{var tag=document.createElement("style");tag.type="text/css";document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(tag);tag[(typeof document.body.style.WebkitAppearance=="string")?"innerText":"innerHTML"]=newcss}})();

------
lgas
This is great, it's like
[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)
but for unicode instead of latex.

------
xg15
An interesting side effect of this is that it shows once again why (naive
implementations of) international domain names presented such a large security
risk. Just draw an "A" and look at the results...

------
ajb
There is also [http://www.nciku.com/](http://www.nciku.com/) for chinese
characters.

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lost_name
It seems (and is logical, I suppose) that you have to match the symbol pretty
closely to get what you're looking for. I drew a car twice, the first time
getting absolutely nothing relevant, and the second time -- trying to be more
precise and using all the space available -- got automobile, taxi, bus, etc,
etc.

edit: The primary problem here, I mean, is that if you don't know what the
symbol looks like and want to see if it exists, you might not get hits the
first time you try to draw, but it might not actually exist anyway.

------
nnnnni
It doesn't support every unicode character yet, but it's getting there. For
example, it recognized the Kannada character ttha (ಠ), but it doesn't know the
poop (💩) character.

~~~
rubinelli
It does! I got it as one of the suggestions while trying to make it recognize
the snowman (my go-to character when I stumble on one of these tools).

~~~
ath0
Did you ever get it to recognize the snowman? That's my go-to also. I've tried
two snowballs, three snowballs, with and without arms, with and without stars,
with and without hat... and all I keep getting is tongue. I am pretty bad at
drawing though.

------
rootbear
I've often thought that the best way to get access to the richness of Unicode
would be a drawing pad, perhaps as part of the keyboard, or as an on-screen
area, for use with a mouse. Character maps just seem clumsy to me.

For fun, I tried Eth ð, Thorn þ, and Hungarian ű, all of which it got, but not
as the first choice. It did not find the Ing rune, which looks a bit like a <
and > combined.

------
byuu
Oh wow, the drawing mechanism is really satisfying.

Too bad about not supporting 漢字. The only half-decent IME pad is on Windows.
Online ones (kanji.sljfaq.org) and Xorg ones (ibus-mozc) are just horrendously
bad at detection. I usually have to resort to multi-radical lookups.

~~~
ue_
Do you mean multi-part? Each kanji only has one radical, but composed of one
or more "parts". jiso.org has this lookup feature.

~~~
byuu
(Late response, sorry.) It may not be proper to say this, but if you look at
加, to me it's clearly the 力 radical + the 口 radical. I know that officially
it's classified under 力. wwwjdic has a tool based around my observation,
called multi-radical lookup: [http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-
bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1R](http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1R)

Sometimes it won't include one of the radicals that are clearly there, though.
But this tool is frequently helpful to me when IME pads fail me, and stroke
counts are fuzzy.

------
teddyh
Nice. I wish the GNOME Character Map¹ could do this.

①
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gucharmap](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gucharmap)

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adultSwim
I drew #. Returned a bunch of characters but none of them was regular old
0x0023.

Took me several tries to get # (regular ascii number sign - i.e. shift+3).

~~~
kitwalker12
I got # on the first try. You helped the machine

------
whitten
This is pretty cool. I expect that even if the code is open source, that the
real value is in the dataset used. Does anyone know the licensing information
?

------
danielweber
This is one of the first sites I learned about from HN a few years ago.
Extremely useful.

------
danieltillett
I just did an 8 and got nothing close, but wow there are a lot of interesting
Unicode characters.

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imakesnowflakes
It works. Good work.

~~~
nnnnni
It'd be nice to take credit, but it's not my page =-)

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benvds
i drew a penis and got the "male sign" :-)

~~~
brotoss
First thing I drew too lol

