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Very cool concept and execution, well done.

I don't quite understand what is going on with the "spotlight" UI concept - I can click around on the characters and it highlights an area and it also reloads the landscape local to the character that I clicked on, so I can sort of traverse the similarity landscape this way. But I feel like I might be missing some part of the visual metaphor?

It’s just a cool visualisation

Agreed. Nice aesthetic. Terrible design.

Well, that wasn’t my conclusion at all to be clear!

I understand trimming input fields is typically a useful default, but in this case this prevents me from searching for a space. So maybe it'd be worthwhile to add a `if (trim(str)=="") return str` exception or something similar?

oh right, good catch

fixed

I didn't notice this at first but if you click the pencil icon you can draw a shape to match against instead of searching with text or browsing with the dropdown

I'm not dyslexic, but this is what I imagine dyslexic hell is.

Seems like search doesn't work for Japanese kanji. Search works for https://unicodeplus.com/U+2F8F But doesn't work for https://unicodeplus.com/U+884C

took me a while, but its working now: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#2F8F and https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#884C

Very impressive that I can sketch a character in the top-left and get a close match. That's a real highlight showing that there's more going on under the hood than a big look-up table.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion looks better and is more useful for finding characters. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

"Everything runs in your browser."

That's cool. The sound effects seem like natural thinking sounds. :)

Several models to compare.

Ouch, my back button

Yeah lol

well you can right click the back button

Unicode standard doesn't define any visual shapes for code points (except conceptual examples for some emoji-like symbols), so this is more some specific font's (that is not even mentioned/cannot be changed) glyph similarity visualization than anything to do with Unicode code point "visual exploration".

This is excellent. I prefer Unicode characters over images when possible, like arrows for example, but often struggle finding the exact one I need. Here I can sketch ‼ what I need and then narrow down my search. This is just perfect, many thanks. UX is easy and intuitive. Goes to my bookmarks.

Like, who knew this is even a character: ᆚ

I made a similar tool that in my opinion looks better and is more useful for finding characters. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to my website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

> visual similarity

> SigLIP 2

Maybe visual-semantic similarity is more appropriate? Nonetheless the design is fantastic

True, thanks for the feedback

One future project idea suggestion. Can we combine these characters to create new ones just like Gboard allows us to intelligently combine emojis to create new complex emojis.

Amused by how many X's there are: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1100B

Did you mean Aegean Check Mark or Old North Arabian letter Teh?

We unified the entire CJK space but there was no "x" unification!

Let me sumamrise my response thusly: 𒁞

It would seem it takes in account a bit more than "visual similarity", otherwise I can't find a good reason for "@" and "U+1F582 (BACK OF ENVELOPE)" being that close.

Also, for years (decades?!) I wanted something similar in Word, for when I knew how to describe the symbol in words, but had a hard time manually searching for in the unwieldly UI. I can't believe that "insert symbol" window still doesn't have any kind of search capability.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion looks better and is more useful for finding characters. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

I agree. If Word had something like this, it would be so much easier to find the symbol you're looking for.

Design is delightful, great job.

The radial glyph wave animation is also really cool, but the novelty will wear off and the delay will become grating especially if one is using the app in a utilitarian manner. Consider skipping transitions/animations if the user signals a preference for reduced/removed motion. Alternatively, you could add an on-page toggle for animations.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion is more useful for finding characters via drawings and similar characters. As you mentioned, the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

yeah that’s a more utilitarian approach mine is more about exploring and navigating the unicode space visually

beauty is in the eye of the beholder

though going through every comment to promote it feels a bit… unnecessary

I agree, you did a great job on the design, especially the border around the grid, I really like it. Also, just checked out your homepage, it looks really, really good

great idea, I think I will do both

done!

Really good looking! Interesting UI/UX insight: I kinda expect to be able to "go back" by inverting the coordinates. So when I have one glyph in focus and select a new one two to the left and five down, I would love to be able to go back by selecting five up and two right to find the "old" glyph. Not sure how well this can be implemented.

Lots of fun trying to go to a target symbol. Especially if you intentionally get yourself stuck in the lines first :D

As an aside: I personally have no use for unicode for bash commands, and the potential for sneaky maliciousness worries me. Does anyone know of a way to automatically strip (e.g. with tr) all unicode away when pasting into a terminal?

Cool but maybe consider a different name? If I want to recommend this tool in a few weeks' time there is approximately 0% chance I'm remembering it's called something like "Charcuterie", despite the clever bit of wordplay.

The title of the page is "Charcuterie — A Visual Unicode Explorer" so a search would bring it up. [edit - tested in a incognito page]

I love the name!

This is so cool, just bookmarked it next to https://emojidb.org/ which is what I've been using in the past for vector-based emoji search.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion looks better and is more useful for finding characters. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

gotta add vector search! that's the main benefit of these tools imo

I want to be able to search abstract concepts like "package" or "download" or "jazz" and see everything vaguely related like emojidb does.

Will look into.

I like the animation work and sound, it really gamifies the experience. I question the usefulness though. But it could make a fun game experience if it were to let people match by colour or align emojis related to each other.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion is more useful for finding characters. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

I use it to find icons I likr

This is cool but the characters are awful small on my iPhone 14 Pro. Decent bit of wasted space too. Why are the characters in the previous history list (on the “rim” so much bigger than the characters I’m actively exploring?

The name sounds really bad in French. Charcuterie is a pig butchering shop, usually associated with messy bloody stuff. The verb “charcuter” also refers to surgery done poorly.

But yeah I guess the pun makes it work in english

I’m a native French speaker, and “charcuterie” doesn’t really carry that negative meaning in everyday use. It’s very commonly used to mean cold cuts / prepared meats.

The butcher is un charcutier, and the shop is une boucherie. La charcuterie refers to the food itself, usually cured or prepared meats (pork, cooked, smoked, dried, etc.). So the name works the same way it does in English.

I'm French too :-)

I get why people use French words to name products in english, but une charcuterie, it's somewhat gross and messy. It's Gaulois in a sense. To me it clashes a lot with the look of the website which is more like Tron-ish.

You wouldn't see a charcutier in Tron, would you?

Fair enough. I didn’t go for cultural or visual accuracy when naming it, I just wanted something loosely tied to characters / unicode, and the pun clicked for me. I still like it a lot.

I looked this up as I was sure boucherie is the butchering/bloody bit. I think I'm right, charcuterie means essentially the same thing as it does in English.

I didn't realise it was a French word, though, and thought the char was referring to smoking, even though I know not all charcuterie is smoked. But, in fact, char means flesh (chair) and cuterie means cookery. So it's more like "flesh-cookery" if we wished to translate it.

aksherlee, to les crapauds, a char is a tank.

aksherlee <= nice one

Thanks for that little rabbit hole!

Learned about a bunch of new emoji!

The design is fun.

I think matching the drawing input to emojis need some work - no matter how I draw a smiley face, I never get any smiley face emoji (or any emoji) as a suggestion.

This is one of those designs that should be implemented on every computer. I'd love to have a little button pop up that helps my identity a symbol.

I made a similar tool that in my opinion is more useful for finding characters, either by text search, drawing, or selecting a similar character. I feel that the tool the OP posted seems cool for short periods of entertainment, but isn't very useful for utility. Link to the website here: https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app

I get weird behavior if I enter a Korean Hangul symbol like 소, it doesn't show visually similar symbols, it seems to be random stuff.

Bookmarked as an excellent tool. I use it to find alternatives to "forbidden" characters in filenames. For media files, mostly.

To visually compare characters you need to map them to glyphs; what is the glyphset and how much of Unicode does it actually cover?

The only way that I can think of to respond to that question is this: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/data/fonts/fonts.css

Love this. I hope it works with Japanese kanji too, because sometimes I forget the exact character but remember a similar one.

It does

It only seems to work for some subset of CJK characters. I haven't been able to figure out why some work and some don't.

For instance 叱 and 明 both seem to fail in the same way: U+1F996 T-REX in the upper left corner and the URL fragment fails to update.

A cool website that can be gamified like Wikipedia! You can do things like racing to find the among us character ඞ :)

Love it.

Svg backups would be nice when chars render as boxes.

should be less boxes now!

Reminds me of early 2000's web design with Flash websites. Those were good times.

Oh no they weren't!

Could this be used to make better ASCII animations?

WOW! What a lovely way to explore the character map.

This is impressive! Thanks for sharing.

This is quite remarkable. Great work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361257

This tastes delicious. The sound is perfectly restrained and animation is intentional. I wish more apps were as playful as this.

Very cool concept and execution.

Anyone else think of the film 'Hangar 18'; specifically the alien language they find on the UFO?

anyone know how this works? i assume just rasterizing and embedding?

exactly

ported my random glyph generator to this method using pytorch timm and... it works! very cool

Amazing concept!

Sounds delicious!

Love the name, very clever

WOW. JUST WOW ‼

Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer