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.

>> Use it

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. ]]> http://rishida.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=362 0 http://rishida.net/blog/?p=352 http://rishida.net/blog/?p=352#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:17:02 +0000 r12a http://rishida.net/blog/?p=352

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.

>> Use it

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.

>> Use it

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 is the first version 9 picker. Changes introduced in version 9 include moving the buttons that allow you to display different views to just below the page title. Also, in version 8 pickers, there was an icon in the phonic view that allowed you to dump to the output the phonetic transcription that builds up while selecting characters. This has been replaced with a button just below the output field. There were a number of other superficial changes.

A significant addition to the Malayalam picker is the ability to convert Malayalam text into a Latin transliteration, based on ISO 15919. There was already a way to convert Latin transliterations to Malayalam script.

This version also continues to allow you to type in chillu characters as either single characters as included in Unicode v5.1, or as a sequence of consonant+virama+zwj. Additions to the Malayalam repertoire added in v5.2 have not yet been added to the picker.

>> Use it

About the tool: BCP 47 language tags are built from subtags in the IANA Subtag Registry. This tool helps you find or look up subtags and check for errors in language tags. It also provides information to guide your choices.

Latest changes: I reworked the informational text that accompanies macrolanguages, their encompassed languages, and extlang subtags. As part of that, I changed the code to allow for highlighting of specific cases. For example, where legacy may dictate that the macrolanguage subtag (zh) is more useful for Mandarin Chinese than the more specific tags (cmn or zh-cmn).

I simplified the intro to the page, but added a link to the new article Choosing a Language Tag, which provides useful step-by-step guidelines on creating language tags.

I also changed the user interface somewhat. The input fields are easier to work with and take up less vertical space. Also, you can now submit a query by simply hitting return after typing into a field. I had originally required you to click on a submit button so that all values in other fields would be retained when the answer is shown – this was so that while checking various subtags you could build up a language tag in the Check field for later checking. I just found that the annoyance of continually having to resubmit after forgetting to click on the submit button wasn’t worth the extra functionality (and I was also encouraged to do so by feedback from Bert Bos).

>> Use it

It took me a while to find the time, but I have finally upgraded UniView to suport the final 5.2 release of Unicode, plus a few extra features.

The order of blocks listed in the top left pulldown menu was changed to ressemble the order in the Unicode Charts page. Several sub-block selections were also added to the list (as in the Unicode page), and are displayed in italics.

When you display details of a character in the right panel, the heading Script group has now been used to indicate the sub-block-level headings in the block listings of the Unicode Standard. The link to the Unicode block now follows the heading Unicode block. These sub-block-level headings are also shown when you display a range as a list (as opposed to a matrix).

When you mouse over characters displayed in a matrix, the codepoint and name information for that character now appear just above the matrix. This makes it much easier to locate characters you are looking for.

Finally, but by no means least, small and large graphics are now available for all 1071 Egyptian Hieroglyph characters. This was the last block for which graphics were completely unavailable.

See http://rishida.net/tools/conversion/

Thanks to Martin Dürst for the suggestion.

I have added a bunch of additional new features to my lookup tool to help with choosing language tags. There is additional information available when you look up subtags (such as what to use if the subtag is deprecated, and what subtags macrolanguages enclose, etc.), and more tests on well-formedness with clearer explanations of the problem. Example.

This should make it a lot more useful to people who haven’t read BCP 47 and want to create language tags. Hopefully, in a short while, I’ll also write and link to an article that describes how to use subtags from the ground up in a procedural way, that will complement the tool.

For further assistance, you can now link from a language subtag result to the SIL Ethnologue, to make it easier to check whether that subtag really does refer to the language you were thinking of.

In addition, script subtag results link to Unicode blocks in UniView.

The IANA Subtag Registry has been recently updated to contain 220 extlang subtags and the ISO 639-3 language subtags, taking the total number of subtags to almost 8,000.

I have produced a new version of my lookup tool to help with language tagging. In addition to helping you find subtags and lookup the meaning of subtags, it now helps check the well-formedness of a language tag.

The tool provides access to all currently defined subtags, including the new extlang subtags.

Parsing language tags. In addition to trying to make the user interface more friendly, I also added the ability to parse hyphenated tags and discover their structure and check for errors. I’m not claiming with this release that the new parser field tests all the corner cases, but it should provide reports for most of the typical errors.

It reports errors for the following:

- subtags that are not in the registry (by type)
- incorrectly ordered subtags
- duplicate variant tags and multiple tags of other types
- overlong private use subtags

Try this example.

It doesn’t yet handle extensions, but then there aren’t any valid ones to handle yet anyway.

I hope that’s useful.