Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want
shapecatcher.com
shapecatcher.com
Neat concept though!
I eventually managed to get it as a third match, but this seems to be what it matches against [0], which isn't the ampersand I'm used to (nor the one you get in a google image search).
In other words, based on minimal stroke primitives (line, arc, circle, etc.) that were placed not with any exact coordinates, but simply in relation to each other conceptually and with crude size/position categories. E.g. "downward stroke, top to bottom" is a capital "I" while "downward stroke, middle to bottom, dot closely above first stroke" would be a lowercase "i". And then for matching forms with different meanings, there would be a final "family" selector, e.g. to distinguish an em-dash from the Chinese character for "one", or an en-dash ("punctuation" family) from a minus sign ("math symbol" family).
And then a suitably compressed bit encoding for the instructions. So in the end, something like "I" might just be 3-4 bits long, while a complex Chinese glyph might be 60 bits.
But the main feature being that a font renderer could always draw a primitive version of any glyph, even if you don't have it in a single font anywhere, because the character code itself encodes it. And then that character codes wouldn't be just something totally arbitrary invented by Unicode, but inherently meaningful, and anyone could be free to invent any character they wanted, that would always been drawn by any software, no Unicode gatekeepers needed.
Obviously it's not terribly practical, for a whole host of reasons. But I still sometimes think about how elegant it would be to have a "geometric" self-describing character encoding, and to get away from all of the political decisions around language scripts and where they get put in Unicode and in which version.
Or if you go the opposite direction, and expect each individual character to make its own individual choices in this regard — well, that basically has the same problems as PDFs: it may look good, but it’s totally impossible to process programmatically, since it overspecifies the visual details at the expense of semantics. And although that might be fine and even desirable for certain usecases, it does limit the places where this format could be used.
That being said, I can certainly see possibilities and places where this could be useful to me. Perhaps I’ll have a go at implementing this someday.
[0] In case those look the same in your font, here they are again:
a/ɑ g/ɡ
Again, more of a thought experiment of how character encoding might have gone a different way in the past. And because canonical forms would be required for interoperability it would still need a coordinating body (like Unicode) to standardize them, but people would still be free to encode their own meaningful characters outside of the standards (such as rare/ancient family name characters in Chinese that aren't in Unicode).
What's really fun to think about is how rendering libraries might even use machine learning to draw glyphs when no font glyph is available, in the style of an existing font, whether a garamond serif, or brush Chinese.
Maybe you don't bother (i.e., don't try to parse bytes in this encoding as plain text) but that has a bunch of consequences too.
... but not ℏ.
> Currently, there are 11817 unicode character glyphs in the database. Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currently not supported.
‾⎻⎼⎽ lines
_ light lines
different angles of /, \
etc...
I'm using these for documentation and monodraw is only useful up to a point and references to these are scattered in different pages in no relation for drawing purposes.
I tried drawing a \, but shapecatcher only show just "\" and only if it's semi-close to 45°.
Edit: Thanks @mapierce2 , Detexify seems to work better for this purpose, but the results seems to be images, not text.
It mentions not all characters are in the the database.
ETA: it's got a pretty weird snowman. http://shapecatcher.com/unicode/info/9731
By immitating this rendition I was able to bring it up.
It would be nice for it to also give alt codes for it in the output
like é = [alt 1 3 0]
Doesn’t recognize.