Unicode utilities

February 3, 2010 1:46 PM

Unicode? There’s an app for that. Need to enter a few characters in a script you only kind of understand? Got a string of characters you can’t figure out? The W3C’s Richard Ishida can help. Ishida’s vast set of browser-based character pickers and troubleshooters let you assemble phonetics, peruse and search Unicode characters, or just paste in a string of characters and get a nice list of every single character in the string.

Not actually iApps. (But shouldn’t they be?) Utilities rely in part on DecodeUnicode (previously). Blog with updates.

posted by joeclark (11 comments total)

The older I get, the more non-self-explanatory-UI averse I find myself. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I have infinite time anymore.
posted by BaxterG4 at 2:29 PM on February 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

BaxterG4: "The older I get, the more non-self-explanatory-UI averse I find myself. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I have infinite time anymore."

There's a man page for that.
posted by psyche7 at 2:36 PM on February 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Prediction: this tool will allow the production of tattoos in mangled foreign scripts to increase.
posted by 1adam12 at 3:06 PM on February 3, 2010

Ooh, that's good. And fun. And quicker, for me, to type short phrases with than the virtual keyboard thingy here.
posted by motty at 3:18 PM on February 3, 2010

Thanks, joe — I'm tits-deep in cleaning up a badly miscoded text file for import as UTF-8 and this might help!
posted by nicwolff at 3:25 PM on February 3, 2010

Cool! I'll be playing with these. My usual Unicode tool is the Unicode Sliderule, which provides ways to pick characters and to find out what a character is, but it also has a bit of a non-self-explanatory-UI.
posted by dreamyshade at 3:40 PM on February 3, 2010

Something makes me think this thread will be one to watch....
posted by JHarris at 3:51 PM on February 3, 2010

I'd love to see something like Detexify for Unicode.
posted by delmoi at 5:07 PM on February 3, 2010

The older I get, the more non-self-explanatory-UI averse I find myself. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I have infinite time anymore.

Do you find yourself more concerned with lawn traffic as well?
posted by delmoi at 5:08 PM on February 3, 2010

Very nice, thanks!
posted by languagehat at 5:25 PM on February 3, 2010

I wish I’d written this better. The phrase “an inventory of characters” could have been used.
posted by joeclark at 8:40 AM on February 4, 2010