☃ [unicode table for you]

August 31, 2009 11:36 AM

⍾ LI'L MUSHROOM GUY
⎌ LEAP-FROGGIN' O's
☣☮ BIOHAZARDOUS HIPPIE WARNING
∰ THREE VIOLINS SHARING HULA HOOP
☃ Unicode table for you: with sliders to help you whiz through all those characters you didn't even know you had. ☃
⫷ All symbols in the table have links underneath them which lead to active Wikipedia Pages. ⫸
[ previously ① ⓑ ☠, via ]
␄
posted by not_on_display (91 comments total)

I guess it might help if all the symbols next to each line didn't look like this: ⎌
posted by cmgonzalez at 11:37 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]

ZALGO!
posted by Artw at 11:40 AM on August 31 [4 favorites]

23
7E
posted by fuq at 11:40 AM on August 31 [1 favorite]

This post is eponhisterical for most of these characters on my computer.
posted by octothorpe at 11:40 AM on August 31 [14 favorites]

ZAL-

shit
posted by jquinby at 11:44 AM on August 31

I think I love you.

♡
posted by Mister_A at 11:46 AM on August 31

􏰄􏰅
posted by vacapinta at 11:48 AM on August 31

Is "for you" some sort of Unicode pun? (See "Unicode snowman.." and "Unicode table..")
posted by Plutor at 11:48 AM on August 31

[ðɪs wɪl ɛnd wɛl]
posted by iamkimiam at 11:51 AM on August 31 [6 favorites]

In all seriousness, two questions:

1) Why are most of the characters not rendering for me? Is there something I need to install?

2) How to I go about using Unicode characters. I don't know what to do with "89;" or "x0059;" (for example).
posted by slogger at 11:51 AM on August 31

Sliders may be the least best way to navigate this kind of information, especially when labelled "x100" &etc.
posted by boo_radley at 11:52 AM on August 31 [2 favorites]

Crap, that was supposed to be "& # 89;" ... see, I really don't know what I'm doing!
posted by slogger at 11:52 AM on August 31

The Ethiopic symbols make me want to program some sort of Mega-Kroz game:

ⶠ ⶡ ⶢ ⶣ ⶤ ⶥ ⶦ
posted by boo_radley at 11:56 AM on August 31

Ѡ is by far the best character in any font.
posted by Copronymus at 11:58 AM on August 31

Well, maybe except for the tramp stamp: Ѿ
posted by Copronymus at 11:59 AM on August 31 [8 favorites]

Is that the buttcheeks symbol?
posted by Mister_A at 11:59 AM on August 31

This is seriously. Friggin. Great. I care less about the obscure Unicode character angle, as I do having a very quick and user-friendly way of scrolling through the massive character set that is the Unicode code page. I hadn't previously found a means of doing that, that wasn't terribly cumbersome.

Thank you so much, not_on_display!
posted by Brak at 12:00 PM on August 31

It's an archaic Cyrillic letter, apparently.
posted by Copronymus at 12:01 PM on August 31

Why are most of the characters not rendering for me? Is there something I need to install?

For the same reason they're still unusable on the web for anything important: too many people, too many computers, and too many browsers still don't handle them correctly.

(Of course, for wanking around on MetaFilter, they're just fine.)
posted by rokusan at 12:04 PM on August 31

not " two snakes coming together over a black sun?" Damn, I was hoping Set got his own unicode symbol.
posted by khaibit at 12:05 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Nearly every character in the 10000 and higher set doesn't work for me, quite a few of the characters in the 1000 and higher set don't work for me...

It's a cute idea, but there seems to be a wide discrepancy between what Unicode promises and what it delivers.
posted by hippybear at 12:09 PM on August 31

A lot of these just turn up as squares, which I don't understand because I have a crapload of fonts installed.
posted by GavinR at 12:10 PM on August 31

Symbols that look like ducks:

ک

ﻃ

ﺊ

ی

And, as a bonus, here's a little man:

ﻐ

[this classic comment brought to you by Mefi Search]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:10 PM on August 31 [3 favorites]

Crap, that was supposed to be "& # 89;" ... see, I really don't know what I'm doing!

The ampersand - hash - number - semicolon sequence is how you add odd characters to HTML source text (or XML). When a web browser sees that, it will try to dig up the corresponding symbol; with a little luck, the symbol is present in the current font, and when it's not, most modern browsers will look for it in a different font. If that fails, they display some standard placeholder instead (such as a small box).
posted by effbot at 12:11 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Lotsa handy Chinese characters -- particularly radicals -- I wish were more common.
posted by RavinDave at 12:11 PM on August 31

from the "display problems" webpage at unicode.org:

On Mac OS X, the Safari Web browser includes Unicode support and OmniWeb directly supports Unicode drawing. OmniWeb, however, does not currently provide support for all of Unicode. It can, however, take advantage of Unicode fonts for Windows if properly installed.

There are currently no Web browsers which provide direct Unicode drawing on the Mac OS 9.x or earlier. All the browsers use Apple Language Kits and WorldScript to varying degrees to support Unicode and international text.

Language Kits are installed using your Mac OS 9.x installation CD. Launch the Mac OS Install application. Proceed through the initial screens, selecting the appropriate boot disk. When you reach the "Install Software" screen, click on the "Customize" button. This opens up the Custom Installation and Removal dialog box.

Scroll down to "Language Kits." Click on the check box, and then select "Customized Installation" from the installation popup to the right. (It will say "None selected" at first.)

This brings up a dialog box with a list of all the available language kits. Select the ones you want, or use the menu at the top of the dialog box to select all of them. Proceed with the installation.

If you already have Mac OS 9.0 installed, you will be asked if you want to add or remove software after you select the installation disk. Click on the "Add/Remove" button. This will bring you to the Custom Installation and Removal dialog box.

The installation procedure is the same for Mac OS 8.6, except that you will be installing "Multilingual Internet Access" instead of Language Kits. For Mac OS 8.5.5 and earlier, it will be necessary to purchase the individual language kits.

Someone needs to update their help pages, I think.
posted by hippybear at 12:12 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Unicode table for you: with sliders to help you whiz

Don't eat the yellow snowman.

Actually, that slider link is pretty damn awesome.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:13 PM on August 31

⒡⒰⒞⒦ ⒴⒠⒜⒣ ⒰⒩⒤⒞⒪⒟⒠
posted by togdon at 12:13 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

I was really hoping there would be a ZOSO symbol somewhere. Or at the very least a pot-leaf. I'm going to write an angry letter to Agfa Monotype about this.
posted by "Elbows" O'Donoghue at 12:15 PM on August 31

Someone ought to come up with a tool that lets you draw something and come up with the Unicode characters that are visually closest.
posted by delmoi at 12:17 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

Is "for you" some sort of Unicode pun? (See "Unicode snowman.." and "Unicode table..")

I think a lot of webgeeks are just friends, is all.

I am saving these here for later: ° ¢ °
posted by jessamyn at 12:17 PM on August 31

My new favorite emoticon:
⍢
they gleeful yip-yip.
posted by idiopath at 12:18 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

I demand an ability to render these unicode characters on this FF 3.5 XP SP 3 machine. Make it so.
posted by cavalier at 12:22 PM on August 31

I will now use the "END OF MEDIUM" character to destroy the entire Internet.

␙

It didn't work.
posted by lucius at 12:23 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

☋
☀

Here you go, khaibit. Now what is the riddle of steel?
posted by ecurtz at 12:27 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

௰

Ha, you've just been mooned.
posted by digsrus at 12:28 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

𝕱𝖀�𝕶
�𝕰𝕬𝕳
posted by idiopath at 12:31 PM on August 31

Yeah, I futzed around earlier this month and couldn't get more than about 50% rendering satisfaction, and I'm using FF 3.5 XP SP3 as well. It shouldn't be this hard (and I know more about this than most).
posted by dhartung at 12:34 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

23
7E

Yeah I'm getting a lot of that too. It's already been asked, but how do I fix this?
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 12:36 PM on August 31

> It's a cute idea, but there seems to be a wide discrepancy between what Unicode promises and what it delivers.

Unicode promises a single code page that covers every character in every known language. And that's pretty much what Unicode delivers.

What's not delivering for you is your browser and/or operating system's native ability to render the Unicode character set in its entirety. Much of this can be alleviated by installing various language packs and add-ons. Where it cannot, this is not a failure of the Unicode specification.

Sorry if that seems pedantic, but as a software developer who's had to code a fair amount of textual analysis, Unicode has been an absolute godsend over the abominable lack of consistent standards that came before it.
posted by Brak at 12:39 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Suddenly everything in MetaFilter is being written in Unicode. Holy crap, we've turned into Team Fortress 2!
posted by spamguy at 12:40 PM on August 31

☋
☀

This is also known in some typography circles as a "guiche".
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:59 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

I wonder if threads like this are or will be useful in some kind of web-archeological context at some point in the future, as snapshots of a moment when an emergent standard works for some users and not for others. I remember when images on the web only displayed about half the time, for another example.

Anyway, is this thread kind of like the Zalgo one? I can't even tell.
posted by sleevener at 1:13 PM on August 31

It's an order of magnitude less annoying than the Zalgo thread, that much I can tell you.

I still love that the Unicode website itself doesn't have any more recent Macintosh information than the introduction of OS 9.
posted by hippybear at 1:23 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

Possibly this is a case of "AHM DOIN IT WRONG," but I don't see how the slider set-up is in any way useful. I want a giant table of these suckers that I can scroll through or page through like a regular website. Can someone explain to me the purpose of setting them up in such a fashion that you have to use extremely careful mouse movements just to go from "page" 1 to "page" 2?

Or, can anyone point me to a page that shows them all in a giant table?
posted by tzikeh at 1:33 PM on August 31

I think this is the giant table you're looking for.

ff
posted by jessamyn at 1:37 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

웙 YES IT IS I CAPTAIN 2E
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:44 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

^{^}tzikeh: "Or, can anyone point me to a page that shows them all in a giant table?"


This may be what you are looking for: Giant Table with individual characters

See Also:
• Giant Table, Zoomable
• Tables split into groups, in .pdf format
posted by not_on_display at 1:44 PM on August 31

There was a (deleted) FPP about someone who had created a GIANT wall poster / chart which was every Unicode symbol printed out, numbered, named... I can't find it at the moment, but it was impressive enough that I actually considered downloading the .pdfs and talking to my local print shop about trying to get my own copy printed. I have a bedroom which needs things on its walls, and that would pretty much take care of it.
posted by hippybear at 1:44 PM on August 31

hippybear, I give a thumbs-up to that idea. If you find the site again, let me know--that would be the perfect thing for the very bare wall directly behind my computer desk.
posted by tzikeh at 1:53 PM on August 31

웙 I HAVE A SWORD FYI
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:56 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

Starting today, I'm going to propose Leap Froggin' Os as an icon for every user action that comes up on my projects, until somebody bites.
posted by davejay at 2:12 PM on August 31

⍢ is the happiest emoticon ever.

(as ⍥ is the most frightened.)
posted by punchdrunkhistory at 2:20 PM on August 31

Effbot, it is a common misconception that you have to use a character entity to make a “Unicode character” appear on a Web page. If the HTML file uses Unicode encoding and such is also declared in that file or on the server, you can just type the character. Or paste it in. They’re just characters, not ingots of plutonium. And everything you are reading on this page, including the letters A through Z inclusive, is a “Unicode character.”

As Korpela explains in the well-done book Unicode Explained (my review), Unicode very much does not “promise a single code page that covers every character in every known language,” Spamguy.

Still, it’s yet another fun invention from Paul Ford. See also: Richard Ishida’s tools; FileFormat.info.
posted by joeclark at 2:23 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

༼





            ಠ_ಠ



(birdwatching)
posted by starman at 2:30 PM on August 31 [4 favorites]

I � UNICODE!
posted by ymgve at 2:30 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Unicode very much does not “promise a single code page that covers every character in every known language,” Spamguy.

Then, pray tell, what does Unicode promise, if not roughly that?
posted by Brak at 2:32 PM on August 31

Testing:

x2460; x2460; x2461; x2462; x2463;

interesting. I have ampersand-pound-x2460-semi-colon for ① (and then 2461 for 2, 2462 for 3, 2463 for 4). The *first* ① shows up as that weird, broken x2460; printed to screen w/o showing the ampersand or pound (as you can see), but the next one--same exact code-- shows up as ①.

If I remove the code for the first ① (the one that doesn't work) from my comment, then the *next* ① (the one that currently does work) stops working.

Buh?

x2460; x2461; x2462; x2463;

And now that above *does* work.

I used to do this for a living, ya know!
posted by tzikeh at 2:34 PM on August 31

whut; x2485; x2485;

The above post worked in preview.

I give up now.
posted by tzikeh at 2:37 PM on August 31

Ah, nevermind. If the Wikipedia page is to be believed, I'd say that my statement and the Unicode Consortium's stated goals are roughly equivalent:

The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments.

posted by Brak at 2:37 PM on August 31

Preview is just there to trap the unwary.
posted by Artw at 2:38 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

How long before we have a MeFi user with nothin' but unicode in the user name?

(Would be a pain in the ass to type in when signing in though)
posted by caution live frogs at 2:58 PM on August 31

⚇ ⚇

┈┈

looks better in black on white..
posted by pernoctalian at 3:00 PM on August 31

(Would be a pain in the ass to type in when signing in though)

Just copy and paste the name from a previous comment.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:14 PM on August 31

⍾ LI'L MUSHROOM GUY
⎌ LEAP-FROGGIN' O's

posted by not_on_display.

Eponysterical.
posted by mazola at 3:27 PM on August 31

Well, I can't locate the deleted MeFi FPP, but I seem to have found the chart I was looking for, and another one for a more recent version of Unicode. I think I'm more partial to the first one, because it lists the hex code for each symbol. But I'm a geek that way.

Damn, now I have to actually go talk to the clueless drones at the local print shop.
posted by hippybear at 3:35 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

This post is eponhisterical for most of these characters on my computer.
posted by octothorpe at 12:40 PM

Eponysterical.
posted by mazola at 4:27 PM

ⓓⓞⓗ! ☹ ♴
posted by mazola at 3:35 PM on August 31

I am saving these here for later: ° ¢ °

HTML has built in entities for ¢, ¢ and °, °
posted by delmoi at 4:43 PM on August 31

FINALLY! 4chan and metafilter have something in common

  ▲
▲ ▲
posted by Bonzai at 4:51 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Error: Your username contains characters that are not allowed in usernames—Metafilter only supports English letters in usernames

Bugger. Because having ʯɲɨƈȪɖɇ șȠØೞოᾀᾗ as a username would be so frakin' cool.
posted by nonspecialist at 5:32 PM on August 31 [4 favorites]

My main reference for navigating Unicode for fun and profit has been the Unicode Sliderule. Among other things, it displays all the characters in chunks according to their official category (with a drop-down menu, not sliders), and it lets you paste in a character and find out what it's called.

The Decode Unicode wiki is also fun: "Through a wiki function, we collect information on every single character: What does it stand for? In which languages is it used? Since when has it been known?" It also offers a poster for sale.
posted by dreamyshade at 5:53 PM on August 31 [2 favorites]

dreamyshade: that sliderule is kickass. With its help I made up a new game, anyone care to play?

♖ ⚢⚩♔♕ ☺⚤♖
♗ ♗♗♗♗ ♗♗♗
⬛⬜⬛⬜⬛⬜⬛⬜
⬜⬛⬜⬛⬜⬛⬜⬛
♝♝♝ ♝♝ ♝♝♝
♜⚣♥ ♚♛ ⚨⚧♜
posted by idiopath at 7:09 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Is this what Metafilter has been reduced to without the img tag?

Apparently so.

♔
posted by armage at 7:26 PM on August 31

Some new single character emoticon oppurtunities:
⍢ shiteating grin / happy yipyip
⍡ snake
⍣ ate a lemon
⍨ confused
⍩ jabbering
⍥ very surprised
⍤ fearful and surprised
⌤ resentful
⎌ kind of dizzy from standing on one's head
ᑥ sad yipyip
ᑒ hungry hungry hippo
ᑈ rightwing nutjob
ᐵ leftwing nutjob
ᐖ buzzed grin
ᐕ totally wasted grin
ᐔ hungry baby bird
posted by idiopath at 7:37 PM on August 31 [5 favorites]

♛
FLAG
IT
and
MOVE
ON

posted by Memo at 8:06 PM on August 31 [4 favorites]

Blazecock Pileon: "This is also known in some typography circles as a "guiche"."

I'll take "worst wikipedia pages" for $400, Alex.
posted by boo_radley at 9:09 PM on August 31 [1 favorite]

Brak, if the statement is that Unicode encodes “every character in every known language,” then that’s an absolute statement (also a false one) and no approximation to it counts, including one you find on Wikipedia.

That isn’t what Unicode does or aims to do. Read Korpela’s book. It takes many paragraphs to explain how many categories of characters Unicode will not encode. Easy place to start: Klingon. More abstract place to start that’s still within Latin script: ct and st ligatures.
posted by joeclark at 9:23 PM on August 31

In the future, we will be able to get our tattoos printed up from unicode fonts.

𝕿𝕳𝖀𝕲 𝕷𝕴𝕱𝕰
posted by idiopath at 9:34 PM on August 31

Is it me or is iPhone Safari marginaly better at rendering this these days?
posted by Artw at 11:23 PM on August 31

A bunch of the cute emoticons like ⍨ come from the APL programming language, which sounds kind of wacky.

Fun with names! Unicode eye chart (with reference key for the optometrist). Favourite Unicode Codepoints: GLAGOLITIC CAPITAL LETTER SPIDERY HA, HEAVY BLACK HEART, DONG SIGN.

And this is a self-link, but @unifaces welcomes contributions. Send it your faces made of Unicode characters and we'll retweet the finest ones. ⸉ᘓꏿ‿ꏿᘐ⸊
posted by dreamyshade at 12:41 AM on September 1 [2 favorites]

Unicode promises a single code page that covers every character in every known language. And that's pretty much what Unicode delivers. What's not delivering for you is your browser and/or operating system's native ability to render the Unicode character set in its entirety.

Yup, just to add to the discussion here, but when it comes to Brahmi-derived scripts (which would be, most of the scripts in India and many more in South East Asia), this distinction is rather subtle; because letters can be 'combined' to form conjunct-consonants, often times, an ability to _display_ Unicode characters isn't enough to _render_ them. That is to say, while the word for 'letter' in Hindi is 'akshar' (अक्षर), the middle consonant there 'ksha' (क्ष) is actually a conjunct-consonant, 'made' by 'mixing' as follows:

'ksha' (क्ष) = ka' (क) + halant (्) + sha' (ष)

This distinction is clearly visible when you compare Indic-rendering OS's (like Vista by default, or XP with an optional installation) with Unicode-compatible OS's like iPhone's OS. Vista would show क्ष correctly, but if you're reading this on iPhone's Safari, it'll presumably be shown as क् ष.

How long before we have a MeFi user with nothin' but unicode in the user name?

Technically, considering that the Roman alphabet and ASCII characters are subsets of the Unicode set, we're already there. :-)

Also, ర is 'ra' in Telugu and is quite a, ummm, not-easily-frightened, letter; forgot what the exact Sanskrit term is, for consonants of that class, but they're supposed to be less subtle and more in-your-face than other classes of consonants.

ಠ_ಠ

Tha_Tha in Kannada. [In my experience, it's quite hard to convey the distinction between 'ta', 'Ta', 'tha' and 'Tha' to non-South/South-East-Asians in general, and especially through the Roman script online. :-) ]
posted by the cydonian at 2:30 AM on September 1

For Mac users, there is an easy way to get the unicode pallette onto your menu bar, and usable by clicking on the character you want to insert:

System Preferences > International (under Personal) > Input Menu tab > then check the boxes for "Character Palette" in the menu, and "Show Input Menu in Menu Bar"

You can click on the new icon in the menu bar, and then on "Show Character Palette" and it will give you a pretty handy Unicode browser.

Ѫ
... Ѯ

I, FOR ONE, WORSHIP OUR NEW ALIEN UNICODE OVERLORDS
posted by not_on_display at 12:15 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

☕
posted by erniepan at 12:46 PM on September 1

How long before we have a MeFi user with nothin' but unicode in the user name?
Not going to happen. I'd link to the MetaTalk where its use was exploited but it has been deleted.
posted by tellurian at 5:08 PM on September 1

The search term you're looking for is Rolling Road Block
posted by benzo8 at 5:29 PM on September 1

Wrong thread. I'm so boss!
posted by benzo8 at 5:30 PM on September 1

ྡ screeee ྷ
kin I help u ossifur boss?
posted by not_on_display at 7:02 PM on September 1

How long before we have a MeFi user with nothin' but unicode in the user name?

We had some at one point but they were banned because you could 'clone' usernames using unicode, kind of like paypaI.com and all of those fishing scams back when unicode domains first came out.
posted by delmoi at 9:15 PM on September 1

all of those fishing scams back when unicode domains first came out.
Yeah, they made rods for their own backs with that.
posted by tellurian at 11:14 PM on September 1

༕ ᏌᏁᏓᏟᎾᎠᎬ ᎠᏉᏨᏦ ᎥᏕ ᏁᎤᎿ ᎪᎷᏉᏚᎬᎠ
posted by not_on_display at 7:02 AM on September 2

ૐ
posted by paisley henosis at 7:34 AM on September 4 [1 favorite]