Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want | Hacker News Reader

Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want

shapecatcher.com

101 pointsdwynings31 comments

Some past threads:

Shape Catcher: Find Unicode characters by drawing them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14284750 - May 2017 (28 comments)

Draw a shape to get a matching unicode-symbol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829191 - June 2016 (3 comments)

Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8403103 - Oct 2014 (38 comments)

Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107 - Feb 2013 (107 comments)

Shapecatcher - draw the unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222964 - Nov 2011 (63 comments)

Unicode Character Recognition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208967 - Nov 2011 (11 comments)

No updates on the twitter account since 2013 unfortunately.

This reminds me of the now legendary Detexify tool, which performs handwritten symbol recognition for LaTeX [1].

[1] https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Shapecatcher's front page mentions Detexify as well.

Because I have the emotional constitution of a ten-year-old boy, I immediately tried to draw 𓂺 in it, and it didn't find it even after I looked it up and tried to reproduce it as exactly as possible.

Very cool idea anyway, and would probably work for less juvenile use cases.

I did exactly the same. And I had been expecting the website’s author to have tested it!

Of course I had to test this by drawing an Interrobang: ‽

It got it right. My first drawing didn't have interrobang at the top of the suggestion list, because I didn't have the top closed. So there is some bias from the font it was trained on.

+1. I couldn't get it to understand the partial derivative symbol ∂, unless it was drawn in a very specific way.

But really cool idea, name and execution!

I just tried to quickly sketch something and got this: Ꭿ

Yeah, not bad https://i.imgur.com/hAi7ren.png

I'm surprised by all the search failures people reported in past threads, just about everything I tried worked decently well

That's in my top five favorite glyphs. It's also called the "seraphim" glyph.

It would be nice if the suggestions included the keyboard shortcut for inserting that character.

Depends on the application, doesn't it? It gives the codepoint so you can enter it with, say alt+X in Word or whatever.

Of all the codepoints below 0x100, why is it so bad at Å?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Å

I found that it won't recognize it with a gap between the A and the circle. Join them together and it gets it as the first choice. Maybe the font(s) it used had them connected?

Funny when you draw a circle and realize how many different variants of the same shape are out there. There's a lot of redundancy in Unicode/UTF8

Cool, but looks like they are excluding Chinese characters.

After a dozen tries it still won’t recognize pi :(

I got pi as about the seventh choice.

remember that's it's matching against what is basically an SVG image of a specific font's version of pi, not "how people write pi": draw pi, instead of writing pi, and it'll pick it up pretty high up in the list of matches. https://i.imgur.com/k4AnUme.png

I drew it curved like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Pi... and it was suggesting Unicode characters comprised entirely of right angles (the suggestions themselves changed each time)

I can get it to recognize pi fairly consistently if I include a serif on the right leg; although I still haven't been able to get it to rank pi as the first choice.

Hmm, being able to narrow down the scope would be useful, e.g. have a series of checkboxes for Latin, Greek, math symbols, etc. (presumably pi would be eligible if you check either Greek or math)

Doesn't work very well if at all. I tried two times a very simple Chinese character (木) and it was never in the result list. Edit: didn't work with a very simple cuneiform character either.

It doesn't recognize any Chinese character for me, maybe not trained with a font containing those characters?

On the page right now:

> Currently, there are 11817 unicode character glyphs in the database. Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currently not supported.

It does recognize Hiragana

The main reason something like this might be useful (since I live near Chinese neighborhoods in the SF Bay Area) would be to recognize Chinese characters, at least those that aren't too difficult to draw. So I hope they can be added.

Why? All OS have IMEs built in, all of which are vastly better at recognizing which character you drew than this can ever be.

There's many good existing pieces of software specialised in recognising handwritten CJK characters, which understand stroke order and so on. I think the value of this piece of software is that it's for everything else.

Google Translate has a handwriting mode, and an image recognition mode.

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