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Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want
- smcl 14y agoSounds cool but sadly hasn't worked for the letters I often need but haven't easy access to (czech characters like: ř, ď and š). Perhaps because the element that makes them distinct from the latin (the "haček") is so tiny. Edit, I just drew the ř larger and it recognised it correctly. Cool :)
- Hupo 14y agoCouldn't get it to find the unicode snowman[1]: http://i.imgur.com/gaIY9Gd.png http://i.imgur.com/gaIY9Gd.png (my drawing skills are awesome, no?) But that aside, this looks like a neat idea. Not something I have any immediate use for myself, but could certainly be useful in some situations. [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2603/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2603/index.htm
- lucb1e 14y agoIf a pc can't find it, perhaps drawing things is going to be the new captcha!
- fredley 14y agoCan someone tell me why 'Cat with a wry smile' is in Unicode? Presumably at some point someone thought that it would be useful to somebody else, hence it's inclusion. It would be very interesting to hear the back-story behind such seemingly useless glyphs.
- molf 14y agoThese are Emoji: it's a set of smileys/icons originally used by Japanese carriers. Apple included them in their iPhone, and in order to standardise them they (successfully) requested they were added to Unicode.
- lloeki 14y agoThe history of Emoji before they got standardized is interesting. BTW Google was a requestor too.
- wmil 14y agoI can't get it to recognize 'Pile of Poo' (U+1F4A9) Major bug.
- suprfsat 14y agoGot it: http://i.imgur.com/9APdIbc.png http://i.imgur.com/9APdIbc.png
- dschep 14y agoworked for me: http://i.imgur.com/4EJhUpK.png http://i.imgur.com/4EJhUpK.png
- matthuggins 14y agoTIL there's a pile of poo character.
- cdcarter 14y agoAnd indeed, a MiniDisc is a pile of poo (and Sony end of lifed them today!)
- flux_w42 14y agoHmm, I got the 0x26c4: Snowman without snow: ⛄
- quirm 14y agoYou have to draw the snowflakes
- the_gipsy 14y agoIdea: instead of matching the shape of what the user has drawn raster-wise, let the user draw an svg-like path, and try to identify the letter by the trace.
- seanp2k2 14y agoAgreed that a pen tool or some type of editor would be kind of nice, but for what he's going for (proving out an idea), this is still pretty fun. I know a little of the science behind it, but it'd be great to read through some well-commented source code. He did link in the thesis on this, however: http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20Of%20reCAPTCHA%20-%20Bachelor%20Thesis.pdf http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20...
- lucb1e 14y agoIt didn't recognize the capital letter A, only variations on the letter A and other unknown characters. I'm sure that the letter A is an unicode character!
- Blara 14y agoWorked for me, it's called: Latin capital letter a: A (0x41)
- symmetricsaurus 14y agoTried to draw an alpha but it didn't get it. So far I haven't tried Shapecatcher a lot but I think that http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html works much better. Detexify is of course only for LaTeX symbols and doesn't do unicode. To be useful Shapecatcher needs to become better at recognition.
- fredley 14y agoTrying to draw U+1F4A9 (Pile of Poo). After several attempts, no luck. I have learnt that Unicode contains even more weirdness than I thought before though, including 'Alchemical symbol for borax-3' (U+1f744), and 'doughnut' (U+1f369).
- kaolinite 14y agoWorked really well for me, found a smiley face and a few accented characters. Awesome idea and implementation.
- rurounijones 14y agoDamn that looks good, it worked for me for ② and u with umlauts. Get the Japanese support in there and it will be amazing. What about using MS Mincho or MS Gothic for that? (It is free as in beer, but is the licensing off?)
- adnam 14y agoIt recognized my drawing of a cactus! http://i.imgur.com/pDgIOPk.png http://i.imgur.com/pDgIOPk.png
- MojoJolo 14y agoDamn. I think it's not intended as a cactus. Hahaha.
- adnam 14y agoOf course it's a cactus! What else would it be?
- seanp2k2 14y agoThis is seriously the funniest thing I've seen on HN in weeks. Made me actually laugh.
- hwang89 14y agoprickly.
- seanp2k2 14y agoOoh my word. I drew a Skrillex and it recognized it perfectly; some Chuck Tays because he's a chill bro, school because his music appeals to people in school (12-24), and the Bengali vowel sound because he plays that in his "drops". EDIT: forgot to link screenshot: http://imgur.com/LyaXy4h http://imgur.com/LyaXy4h
- allons-y 14y agoThis is a fun game. http://i.imgur.com/SbjjGlV.png http://i.imgur.com/SbjjGlV.png
- WA 14y agoI wonder how many people try to paint cacti as a quick test for tools like that ;)
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- k_bx 14y ago(surprisingly noone said this) Too bad it doesn't generate links to drawing results.
- jessaustin 14y agoHosting uploaded images exposes sites to a great deal of annoyance.
- quirm 14y agoI think there is away to not host images - I could just record strokes and play that back with js.
- quirm 14y agoI was working on this last weekend - sorry I didn't know someone would post this is again to ycombinator ;)
- uvdiv 14y agoMy simple, clean ampersand (&) became a paperclip (0x1f4ce), a "fried shrimp" (0x1f364), several species of geometric triangle, and dozens of other silly, silly glyphs. http://i.imgur.com/NLkl75J.png http://i.imgur.com/NLkl75J.png the unicode block containing "fried shrimp" 0x1f364 -- why does this exist??? http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf Latest Abstruse Goose comic sums up my emotional response: http://abstrusegoose.com/496 http://abstrusegoose.com/496
- nwh 14y agoWho doesn't love 🍤? There's lot of other strange Unicode too. There's things like '' (U2062 INVISIBLE TIMES), ⓞⓓⓓ ©ⓗⓐⓡⓐ©ⓣⓔⓡ ⓢⓔⓣⓢ and sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ uʍop ǝpısdn. All of which can be used to bypass filters and generally cause browser-crashing havoc. For example, this address looks like Google, but it really links to hacker news. http://news.ycombinator.com/?/moc.elgoog//:ptth http://news.ycombinator.com/?/moc.elgoog//:ptth
- lloeki 14y ago> "INVISIBLE TIMES" Sounds like a Muse song title
- nwh 14y agoI've never been able to work out if it is an invisible ⨉ character, or a character meant for use when things are invisible. Either way works for Muse I suppose.
- taejo 14y agoIt's for mathematics. Some kind of math markup may want to distinguish x times y written xy from a two-letter variable called xy. So the product is x<invisible times>y but is rendered xy.
- uvdiv 14y agoWho doesn't love 🍤? I just discovered the OS X terminal renders the friend shrimp glyph in color! edit: and it's now my $PS1.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoSadly it didn't recognize my clumsy attempt to draw the Look of Disapproval: http://i.imgur.com/0lvPFaJ.png http://i.imgur.com/0lvPFaJ.png On the upside, I learned that there is a Panda Face unicode character.
- niyazpk 14y agoThe look of disapproval is not a single character; it comprises of three characters: [1] _ [1] [1] http://shapecatcher.com/unicode/info/3232 http://shapecatcher.com/unicode/info/3232
- jaymzcampbell 14y agoReminds me of the excellent Detexify, which serves a similar purpose but for LaTeX symbols: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
- andydrizen 14y agoIf you like this, see DeTeXify http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
- ChrisNorstrom 14y agoVery nice and amazingly accurate. But am I using your website the right way? When I look through the characters in the search results, if I see one that isn't rendering on my computer and just has a block instead of the symbol. I've been clicking on "bad" for "rate this suggestion". Thinking that it tallies up the total good/bad for a character to mean "how likely people are to have this character installed and working on their computers". However, I now have a feeling that's not what that feature is for.
- kayge 14y agoMy guess was that the Good/Bad rating is to help with some sort of Machine Learning going on the background. E.g. the way I draw my Ampersand might be slightly different than yours, so if either or both of us see the result we were hoping for (&), that should get our Good rating. If it returns an (8), it may or may not deserve a Bad. If something way off appears as a top result (^), that would be pretty Bad.
- thewarrior 14y agoThey need to prioritise the glyphs based on frequency of occurrence to prevent ridiculous matches.
- neumann_alfred 14y agoYou can rate the recognition results ;)
- seanp2k2 14y agoFound a "secret" http://shapecatcher.com/engine/ http://shapecatcher.com/engine/
- seanp2k2 14y agoFor the curious, this explains a lot of the science in a hands-on, approachable way: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10168686/algorithm-improvement-for-coca-cola-can-shape-recognition http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10168686/algorithm-improv... EDIT: As this is a deep topic, there are also books if that's more your style: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0123725380/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0123725380/?tag=stackoverfl08-20 or maybe you like Wikipedia (Ol' Trusty): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_detection_(computer_vision) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_detection_(computer_vis...
- quirm 14y agoand for the very curious, my bachelor thesis is on shapecatcher, http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20Of%20reCAPTCHA%20-%20Bachelor%20Thesis.pdf http://shapecatcher.com/B_Milde%20-%20On%20The%20Security%20... There is a whole chapter on shape contexts in it, which I use with shapecatcher, too.
- speeder 14y agoNice idea, too bad that I tried to draw several variations of PI, and it showed me several interesting characters, but never a PI. Seriously, it even showed some very PI-like things, but not PI itself. This is a downer.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoAmazing. Try a happy face!
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoDoesn't seem to include the drawing stroke order or anything, just the ultimate image. I guess if you know the strokes, you know the letter already, hm.
- martinced 14y agoAre strokes order available for Unicode codepoints? I know that for many languages they're not important (for example people are free to write 't' from top-to-bottom but from bottom-to-top too) while in others stroke order is very important, like in Japanese. However how would stroke order work for a Unicode codepoint? If it exists, there has to be a lot of info in addition to the codepoint of, say, a kanji.
- Snoptic 14y ago2 previous discussions. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Shapecatcher&start=0 http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=Sha... Maybe the author can write a post detector next.
- nefasti 14y agoI clicked the link reading "Draw the Unicorn character you want" =(
- cygwin98 14y agoNice job done. Here are what I got: ᗧ ᗣ ᗤ ᗢ could be awesome for a character-based PacMan impl.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoReally cool stuff. Luckily, I draw my lowercase 'a's in double-story form, but if you attempt to draw an a (or an accented a) with just a circle and a line, it's recognized as an 'o'.
- oftenwrong 14y agoRelated: A version of this for kanji that is very accurate http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw-canvas.html http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw-canvas.html
- anonymfus 14y agoInteresting thing, it recognized white queen correctly with diamonds on crown, but as black queen without diamonds and failed with only one diamond: http://i45.tinypic.com/3535j4x.png http://i45.tinypic.com/3535j4x.png — screenshot of variant with three diamonds.
- rryan 14y agoAlong these same lines, for LaTeX fans there is http://detexify.kirelabs.org/ http://detexify.kirelabs.org/
- mikle 14y agoIt did pretty well with the first five Hebrew letters. Pretty well as in all but one was found in the top 10 of results.
- a_p 14y agoDoes anyone know if the mirror image of this character: “ (U+201C) exists? I'm looking for a character that is the mirror image of the left double quotation mark, where the base is on the bottom and the character tapers from bottom right to top left. I don't know if any languages use that character.
- FreeFull 14y ago‟ (U+201F) possibly?
- SeanDav 14y agoCouldn't get it to recognize my drawing of a castle/rook in chess, but it did find my bishop. Great site.
- miga 14y agoWell, it didn't recognize pi.
- sparist 14y agoWorked fantastically on my iPad. Excellent idea and execution.
- quasque 14y agoPretty neat, but I'm not sure what else it wants me to draw here http://i.imgur.com/rfU10rj.png http://i.imgur.com/rfU10rj.png Also it seems to fail on badly-drawn birds http://i.imgur.com/IZgrRkq.png http://i.imgur.com/IZgrRkq.png
- quirm 14y ago1) it does count edge pixels - recognition is based on the shape of what you draw, so for the algorithm, a black picture is like a white one (but I admire your endurance to paint it all black) 2) server is under heavy load atm, it might drop some requests - just retry
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIt claims Chinese/Japanese/Korean is unsupported, but works fine for me: http://i.imgur.com/AQBybDT.png http://i.imgur.com/AQBybDT.png
- bryze 14y agoIs that the only character you tried? Try writing "論" and see what happens..
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoI tried 四 and it didn't work. I guess Hiragana and Katakana work, but not Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja.
- quirm 14y agoRight. Hiragana and Katakana ist trivial (just a couple of characters), but no support for Kanjis currently
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cynwoody 14y agoIt got the ⌘-sign on the first try (Place of interest sign: 0x2318, aka the Command Key).
- eoJ 14y agoNice. It's not very good at finding faces though. The right face is there, but way down. http://i.imgur.com/PD1DkV6.png http://i.imgur.com/PD1DkV6.png
- zandomatter 14y agoReally cool. The drawing tool would be even better if it drew as soon as you clicked (i.e., would draw a single dot if you click and don't drag the mouse).
- drucken 14y ago"If you can't find Chinese, Japanese or Korean glyphs, it is because I have yet to find a good free CJK font to use." Are there not some CJK (or otherwise) fonts from, for example, Linux distributions that could have been used? Or perhaps the emphasis could be on clarifying what is meant by "good" that deserves excluding such a large and useful character space for this type of application?
- tempestn 14y agoAwesome idea, but all it ever gives me is a loading bar. shapecatcher.com/engine/recognize eventually returns "504 Gateway Time-out"