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Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. The phrase appears at the bottom of the screen and you can easily cut and paste the result into your own document. They're written in XHTML with a small amount of JavaScript.
Pickers are likely to be most useful if you don't know a script well enough to use the native keyboard. The arrangement of characters also makes it much more useable than a regular character map utility. See the features available and how to use them.
The descriptions can now be found at the bottom of each picker.
Recent additions include: Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer, Urdu, and revitalised Thai, Arabic block and IPA pickers.
Click on the characters in the character grid to see them appear in the box below. (NOTE: JavaScript must be enabled for this to work.) When you have finished creating your string, click on the Select all button and copy and paste or drag and drop the text into the content you are creating.
You can also type directly into the box. This is useful for adding characters from another script, especially ASCII. To avoid overcrowding, the pickers assume that you can enter characters in the ASCII range from the keyboard. Some special characters, such as space, zero width non-joiner, etc. are also made available for clicking.
You can manually move the cursor to any point in the box text and insert characters. Use the keyboard delete and backspace keys to delete content.
Hinting. This is initially turned on in some pickers. Currently this is limited to shape matching, but I am considering implementing a phonetic matching alternative for the future. Shape matching highlights characters with similar shapes, especially when they are not side by side. This makes it easier for people who are unfamiliar with the script to accurate locate the right character from several that look similar. You can turn this off.
Changing the user interface. Controls at the bottom of the page allow you to modify fonts used, the font size, and the height of the output box.
The font selection box contains a list of common, and particularly free-to-download, fonts. You will only be able to apply a given font if it is available on your computer. The notes at the bottom of the page provide links to locations where you can download fonts. If you have a font that is not in the font selection list, type the font name in the Custom font field and hit return.
Searching by character name or codepoint. The Unicode name for a character and its codepoint can be seen by mousing over the character in the clickable area. If you are searching for a particular character and know (at least part of) the name or the codepoint, type that in the search box and hit return. All characters with matching text in the name or codepoint number will be highlighted.
Escapes. If you click on the Escapes button, the Unicode Converter tool will open in a separate window. Here you will find versions of the text in the output box in a number of formats, including numeric character references, javascript escapes, CSS escapes, hex codepoints, etc.
Codepoints. If you click on the Codepoints button, the names of each of the characters currently in the output area will be listed on a separate page, with links to UniView from the names. This is particularly useful to quickly understand the composition of a piece of text you pasted here from elsewhere.
Detail. If you click on the Detail button (not all pickers have this yet), each of the characters in the output area for which detailed descriptions exist in my unicode database will be displayed on a separate page. The descriptions will be listed in the order of the characters.
Show font grid. If you click on the Show font grid text, an internal window will open that shows all the characters made available by the picker, in character form, in a table. The font used will be that currently set for the output box. You can change the font in this subwindow by using the normal font selection or custom font entry fields.
This can be particularly useful for assessing coverage of a given font for characters covered by the picker. If you do this in Internet Explorer, characters not in the font will usually appear as square boxes, or not be shown. Note that you can also compare fonts by scrolling through the font selection list with this subwindow open. (Hint: to see the results side by side, open additional browser windows.)
While in this view you can click on characters to add them to the output area if you first click on Enable output. The output area is hidden by default to make it easier to see all the characters and the font options on the same page.
Show combinations. Some pickers allow you to open another view which contains a collection of character clusters. These are usually conjunct forms or ligated forms that are difficult to spot from their independent parts. You can add these combinations to the output area by clicking on them.
The combinations are presented as characters, not graphics, so you may need to experiment with different fonts to find the shape you are looking for. Some fonts support more of these ligatures and combining forms than others.
Transcription. Some pickers provide a button that will generate what is actually a transliteration of the text in the output window. These transliteration schemes are usually devised by myself, and I make no guarrantee of stability! They are intended to provide a unique Latin or symbolic representation for each unique character in the output box, ie. they do not indicate pronunciation, but do provide a string that can be unambiguously converted back into the original.
You may find this feature useful to work out what characters are involved in runs of text in some of the more complex scripts, eg. Urdu nastaliq, or Tamil, where one or more characters blend together. I will probably add transcription behaviours to the pickers over time.
Personalisation. You can automatically start up a picker with your preferred font etc by including information at the end of the URI as follows:
For example, the following sets all of the above. You can store this in your bookmarks or use it in links to start up the page as you prefer.
http://rishida.net/scripts/pickers/ipa/?font=Doulos%20SIL&size=45&rows=2.5&hints=off
Later versions of the pickers come with multiple 'views', ie. ways of arranging or presenting data. These can be started up directly. For information on how, see the notes at the bottom of the relevant picker.
First published 2004. Last update 2008-03-14 12:33 GMT
Copyright © 2004-2008 Richard Ishida, All Rights Reserved.