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?
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 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?
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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
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!
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?
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?
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
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".
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 agree. If Word had something like this, it would be so much easier to find the symbol you're looking for.
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
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.
great idea, I think I will do both
done!
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.
Let me sumamrise my response thusly: 𒁞
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'm not dyslexic, but this is what I imagine dyslexic hell is.
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
"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
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.
Could this be used to make better ASCII animations?
A cool website that can be gamified like Wikipedia! You can do things like racing to find the among us character ඞ :)
> 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.
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.
Love it.
Svg backups would be nice when chars render as boxes.
should be less boxes now!
Amazing concept!
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
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!
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 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?
Bookmarked as an excellent tool. I use it to find alternatives to "forbidden" characters in filenames. For media files, mostly.
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.
WOW! What a lovely way to explore the character map.
This is impressive! Thanks for sharing.
anyone know how this works? i assume just rasterizing and embedding?
exactly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361257
This is quite remarkable. Great work.
Very cool concept and execution.
Sounds delicious!
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.
Reminds me of early 2000's web design with Flash websites. Those were good times.
Oh no they weren't!
Love the name, very clever
WOW. JUST WOW ‼
This tastes delicious. The sound is perfectly restrained and animation is intentional. I wish more apps were as playful as this.
Anyone else think of the film 'Hangar 18'; specifically the alien language they find on the UFO?