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In 1992 the Chinese government recognised the Fraser alphabet as the official script for the Lisu language and has encouraged its use since then. There are 630,000 Lisu people in China, mainly in the regions of Nujiang, Diqing, Lijiang, Dehong, Baoshan, Kunming and Chuxiong in the Yunnan Province. Another 350,000 Lisu live in Myanmar, Thailand and India. Other user communities are mostly Christians from the Dulong, the Nu and the Bai nationalities in China.

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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 usable than a regular character map utility.

Latest changes: This picker is new. The default view was modified from an original proposal by Benjamin Lee, and is likely to be more useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Lisu. Characters are arranged to simplify entry, with consonants to the left, vowels to their right, and tone marks to their right.

There is also a keyboard view. Many of the positions of characters are based on keyboard layouts I have seen. Those keyboards, however, tended to use some ASCII characters for punctuation, when the Unicode Standard recommends other characters (in particular, MODIFIER LETTER LOW MACRON and MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) or omit some punctuation characters mentioned in the Unicode Standard. The current version of this keyboard, therefore adds some extra characters.

The layout is adequate, given that pickers assume availability of a QWERTY keyboard, however if a real standardised keyboard layout is to be made, it should involve some further changes. For example, people wanting to use syntax characters such as comma, period, semi-colon, single quote, etc, while writing the text in Lisu will need direct access to those characters. They are missing from this layout.

>> Use UniView lite

>> Use UniView

About the tool: Look up and see characters (using graphics or fonts) and property information, view whole character blocks or custom ranges, select characters to paste into your document, paste in and discover unknown characters, search for characters, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc. Supports Unicode 5.2 and written with Web Standards to work on a variety of browsers. No need to install anything.

Latest changes: The major change in this update is the addition of an alternative UniView lite interface for the tool that makes it easier to use UniView in restricted screen sizes, such as on mobile devices. The lite interface offers a subset of the functionality provided in the full version, rearranges the user interface and sets up some different defaults (eg. list view is the default, rather than the matrix view). However, the underlying code is the same – only the initial markup and the CSS are different.

Another significant change is that when you click on a character in a list or matrix that character is either added to the text area or detailed information for that character is displayed, but not now both at the same time. You switch between the two possibilities by clicking on the icon. When the background is white (default) details are shown for the character. When the background is orange the character will be added to the text area (like a character map or picker).

Information from my character database is now shown by default when you are shown detailed information for a character. The switch to disable this has been moved to the Options panel.

Text highlighted in red in information from the character database contains examples. In case you don’t have a font for viewing such examples, or in case you just want to better understand the component characters, you can now click on these and the component characters will be listed in a new window (using the String Analyzer tool).

Access to Settings panel has been moved slightly downwards and renamed Options in the full version.

The default order for items in lists is now <character><codepoint><name>, rather than the previous <codepoint><character><name>. This can still be changed in the Options panel, or by setting query parameters.

I changed the Next and Previous functions in the character detail pane so that it moves one codepoint at a time through the Unicode encoding space. The controls are now buttons rather than images.

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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.

Latest changes: This picker has been upgraded to use the version 10 look and feel, and incorporate new characters from Unicode version 5.2. Characters whose use is discouraged in Unicode have been moved to the advanced section – similar looking images in the main section put multiple characters into the output, as per NFC normalization.

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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.

Latest changes: Both pickers have been upgraded to use the version 10 look and feel.

The Arabic block picker now includes the latest characters added to the Arabic and Arabic Supplement blocks in Unicode 5.1. Characters are displayed using the shape view of version 10 pickers. This saves a lot of space on-screen.

The Ethiopic picker was also updated to include more recent characters from the Unicode Ethiopic block (added in version 4.1), and the layout was improved to make it easier to locate a character. It still covers only the basic Ethiopic block.

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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

Latest changes: I recently added U+2C71 LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH RIGHT HOOK (labiodental tap or flap) to the IPA picker. This was in the IPA chart for a long time, but was only added to Unicode in version 5.1.

Today I also added, at the request of Dan McCloy, four prosodic markers: prosodic phrase, prosodic word, syllable and mora (see the second line of the picture).

Regular users will also notice that I recently upgraded the picker chrome to version 10, too.

About the tool: Look up and see characters (using graphics or fonts) and property information, view whole character blocks or custom ranges, select characters to paste into your document, paste in and discover unknown characters, search for characters, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc. Supports Unicode 5.2 and written with Web Standards to work on a variety of browsers. No need to install anything.

Latest changes: The major change in this update is the addition of a function, Show age, to show the version of Unicode where a character was added (after version 1.1). The same information is also listed in the details given for a character in the lower right panel.

The trigger for context-sensitive help was reduced to the first character of a command name, rather than the whole command name. This improves behaviour for commands under More actions by allowing you to click on the command name rather than just the icon alongside to activate the command.

Some ‘quick start’ instructions were also added to the initial display to orient people new to the tool, and this help text was updated in various areas.

The highlighting mechanism was changed. Rather than highlight characters using a coloured border (which is typically not very visible), highlighting now works by greying out characters that are not highlighted. This also makes it clearer when nothing is highlighted.

In the recent past, when you converted a matrix to a list in the lower left panel, greyed-out rows would be added for non-characters. These are no longer displayed. Consequently, the command to remove such rows from the list (previously under More actions) has been removed.

A lot of invisible work went into replacing style attributes in the code with class names. This produces better source code, but doesn’t affect the user experience.

If you’re interested, I just did a major overhaul of my script notes on Bengali in Unicode. There’s a new section about which characters to use when there are multiple options (eg. RRA vs. DDA+nukta), and the page provides information about more characters from the Bengali block in Unicode (including those used in Bengali’s amazingly complicated currency notation prior to 1957).

In addition, this has all been squeezed into the latest look and feel for script notes pages.

The new page is at a new location. There is a redirect on the old page.

Hope it’s useful.

About the tools: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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 usable than a regular character map utility

Latest changes: The Urdu and Tamil pickers have been upgraded to version 10. This provides new views of the data, but also involved a thorough overhaul and redesign of the pickers. Transliteration functions have also been added for the Tamil picker.

In addition, the Urdu notes page was updated and a new Tamil notes page was created. Database entries were also updated or, in the case of Tamil, created to support the notes pages. These notes pages are the first to use a new look and feel, based on the analyse-string tool I produced earlier this year. This adds information about each character from the Unicode descriptions data to that from my own database.

About the tool: Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. 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

Latest changes: Over the Christmas break I’ve applied version 10 upgrades to the following pickers: Bengali, Hebrew, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Myanmar, Thai and Tifinagh. In the case of Hebrew and Tifinagh, this came down to completely rewriting the pickers.

Key changes in version 10 include the following:

• The visible layout of the shape view has been reduced in the vertical direction by showing a group of characters only when you mouse over the orange keys at the top. This makes it easier and faster to locate characters, and also improves use on screens with restricted space. The way similar characters in other groups is handled has been reinvented to fit the new approach better, and enable faster creation of pickers in the future.
• The visible layout of the transcription view has been adapted in a similar way to the shape view.
• The button to dump the phonetic buffer has been moved to just below the output area.
• The Detail button is now called the Analyse button, and both this and the Codepoints commands now bring up the new String Analyser utility, which provides much better results than the old pages.
• A keyboard view has been added to the Tifinagh picker. This new view may pop up in other pickers in the future.

There were a number of other changes to the code, and not least to the instructions for use on the main picker page and each set of notes below the pickers themselves.

About the tool: This tool shows you what characters are in a string of Unicode characters, and gives you informaiton about each one. Either type/paste the string into the box on the right of the page, or send it in the URL. It’s especially useful if you have no font for the text, or you are trying to unravel a sequence of characters in a complex script, but also allows you to just dig out information about one or more characters.

Here’s an example

By default you see a large graphic image of each character, the Unicode code point number and name, the Unicode script block in which it occurs, any annotations in the Unicode Standard, and any notes for that character in my character database (which I also updated today with information about Hebrew, Malayalam, Lisu and other scripts).

However, the result can be tailored in terms of the level of information and various aspects of the presentation. Simply click on the options to the right of the page, or (again) include the relevant info in the URI.

For example, you can remove any of these items of information individually (except the codepoint and name), or add a text version of the character. You can also choose a smaller graphic.

In addition, notes from my character database contain examples (coloured red). By clicking on these examples you can list the characters in the example text without leaving the page. The list of characters shows up in the right margin.

Oh, and you can click on links to see a character in UniView (to explore its Unicode properties) or to show the whole block in which the character lives.

You’ll shortly see my other applications such as pickers, UniView, etc, linking to this app.

Hope it’s useful.

>> Try it