5 ms·
Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer
- irickt 6mo ago"Everything runs in your browser." That's cool. The sound effects seem like natural thinking sounds. :) Several models to compare.
- mplanchard 6mo agoLove the name, very clever
- siddboots 6mo agoVery 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?
- huflungdung 6mo agoIt’s just a cool visualisation
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoAgreed. Nice aesthetic. Terrible design.
- siddboots 6mo agoWell, that wasn’t my conclusion at all to be clear!
- evilelectron 6mo agoWOW! What a lovely way to explore the character map.
- fortyseven 6mo agoAnyone else think of the film 'Hangar 18'; specifically the alien language they find on the UFO?
- pimlottc 6mo agoThis 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?
- tantalor 6mo agoOuch, my back button
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoYeah lol
- iqfareez 6mo agowell you can right click the back button
- minantom 6mo agoVery cool concept and execution.
- SpyCoder77 6mo ago[dead]
- Cadwhisker 6mo agoVery 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.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- ares623 6mo agoReminds me of early 2000's web design with Flash websites. Those were good times.
- ebruchez 6mo agoOh no they weren't!
- adi_kurian 6mo agoThis is quite remarkable. Great work.
- runeblaze 6mo ago> visual similarity > SigLIP 2 Maybe visual-semantic similarity is more appropriate? Nonetheless the design is fantastic
- meodai 6mo agoTrue, thanks for the feedback
- ghywertelling 6mo agoOne 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.
- _qua 6mo agoI'm not dyslexic, but this is what I imagine dyslexic hell is.
- rustystump 6mo agoThis tastes delicious. The sound is perfectly restrained and animation is intentional. I wish more apps were as playful as this.
- tash_2s 6mo agoLove this. I hope it works with Japanese kanji too, because sometimes I forget the exact character but remember a similar one.
- downboots 6mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361257 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361257
- LowLevelKernel 6mo agoWOW. JUST WOW ‼
- wackget 6mo agoCool 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.
- arttaboi 6mo agoThis is impressive! Thanks for sharing.
- ssss11 6mo agoSounds delicious!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- keyle 6mo agoI 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.
- meodai 6mo agoI use it to find icons I likr
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- d--b 6mo agoThe 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
- globular-toast 6mo agoI 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.
- meodai 6mo agoI’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.
- d--b 6mo agoI'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?
- joshu 6mo agoanyone know how this works? i assume just rasterizing and embedding?
- txzl 6mo agoSeems like search doesn't work for Japanese kanji. Search works for https://unicodeplus.com/U+2F8F https://unicodeplus.com/U+2F8F But doesn't work for https://unicodeplus.com/U+884C https://unicodeplus.com/U+884C
- meodai 6mo agotook me a while, but its working now: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#2F8F https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#2F8F and https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#884C https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#884C
- Koffiepoeder 6mo agoI 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?
- amake 6mo agoTo visually compare characters you need to map them to glyphs; what is the glyphset and how much of Unicode does it actually cover?
- meodai 6mo agoThe only way that I can think of to respond to that question is this: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/data/fonts/fonts.css https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/data/fonts/fonts.css
- alentred 6mo agoThis 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
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- zeltus 6mo agoBookmarked as an excellent tool. I use it to find alternatives to "forbidden" characters in filenames. For media files, mostly.
- haritha-j 6mo agoLet me sumamrise my response thusly: 𒁞
- savolai 6mo agoLove it. Svg backups would be nice when chars render as boxes.
- meodai 6mo agoshould be less boxes now!
- Leptonmaniac 6mo agoReally 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.
- aeonik 6mo agoThis 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.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- roer 6mo agoLots of fun trying to go to a target symbol. Especially if you intentionally get yourself stuck in the lines first :D
- semolino 6mo agoDesign 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.
- meodai 6mo agogreat idea, I think I will do both
- meodai 6mo agodone!
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- meodai 6mo agoyeah 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
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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
- vprcic 6mo agoIt 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.
- cammasmith 6mo agoI agree. If Word had something like this, it would be so much easier to find the symbol you're looking for.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- mjmasn 6mo agoI 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
- lastofthemojito 6mo agoThe 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.
- hootz 6mo agoA cool website that can be gamified like Wikipedia! You can do things like racing to find the among us character ඞ :)
- 0xCE0 6mo agoUnicode 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".
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- me_again 6mo agoAmused by how many X's there are: https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1100B https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/#1100B Did you mean Aegean Check Mark or Old North Arabian letter Teh?
- Rendello 6mo agoWe unified the entire CJK space but there was no "x" unification!
- SubiculumCode 6mo agoAs 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?
- lastofthemojito 6mo agoI 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.
- est 6mo agoCould this be used to make better ASCII animations?
- romanovtexas 6mo agoAmazing concept!
- nikisweeting 6mo agoThis is so cool, just bookmarked it next to https://emojidb.org/ https://emojidb.org/ which is what I've been using in the past for vector-based emoji search.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoI 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 https://unicode-atlas.vercel.app
- nikisweeting 6mo agogotta 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.
- SpyCoder77 6mo agoWill look into.
- atlasagentsuite 6mo ago[dead]
- cadamsdotcom 6mo agoThanks for that little rabbit hole! Learned about a bunch of new emoji!