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Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want
- tbabej 5y agoThis reminds me of the now legendary Detexify tool, which performs handwritten symbol recognition for LaTeX [1]. [1] https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
- sidpatil 5y agoShapecatcher's front page mentions Detexify as well.
- randomstring 5y agoOf 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.
- tpaschalis 5y ago+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!
- yreg 5y agoI just tried to quickly sketch something and got this: Ꭿ
- tasogare 5y agoDoesn'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.
- slmjkdbtl 5y agoIt doesn't recognize any Chinese character for me, maybe not trained with a font containing those characters?
- mjlee 5y agoOn the page right now: > Currently, there are 11817 unicode character glyphs in the database. Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters are currently not supported.
- tinus_hn 5y agoIt does recognize Hiragana
- not2b 5y agoThe 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.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoWhy? All OS have IMEs built in, all of which are vastly better at recognizing which character you drew than this can ever be.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoThere'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.
- fao_ 5y agoGoogle Translate has a handwriting mode, and an image recognition mode.
- Causality1 5y agoIt would be nice if the suggestions included the keyboard shortcut for inserting that character.
- exporectomy 5y agoDepends on the application, doesn't it? It gives the codepoint so you can enter it with, say alt+X in Word or whatever.
- samatman 5y agoBecause 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.
- Diti 5y agoI did exactly the same. And I had been expecting the website’s author to have tested it!
- dang 5y agoSome past threads: Shape Catcher: Find Unicode characters by drawing them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14284750 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222964 - Nov 2011 (63 comments) Unicode Character Recognition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208967 - Nov 2011 (11 comments)
- bobsmooth 5y agoNo updates on the twitter account since 2013 unfortunately.
- arc-in-space 5y agoYeah, not bad https://i.imgur.com/hAi7ren.png 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
- junon 5y agoThat's in my top five favorite glyphs. It's also called the "seraphim" glyph.
- joshribakoff 5y agoAfter a dozen tries it still won’t recognize pi :(
- not2b 5y agoI got pi as about the seventh choice.
- TheRealPomax 5y agoremember 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 https://i.imgur.com/k4AnUme.png
- joshribakoff 5y agoI drew it curved like this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Pi-symbol_(updated).svg/1200px-Pi-symbol_(updated).svg.png 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)
- gizmo686 5y agoI 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.
- rcthompson 5y agoHmm, 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)
- not2b 5y agoCool, but looks like they are excluding Chinese characters.
- sysadm1n 5y agoFunny 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
- anordal 5y agoOf all the codepoints below 0x100, why is it so bad at Å? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Å https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Å
- exporectomy 5y agoI 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?