Following hot on the heels of the last release come some further significant changes to UniView aimed at making it easier to use as Unicode grows.
The big change is that UniView now starts up in graphics mode by default. This means that pages load more slowly, but (especially with the continuing growth of Unicode) also means that you are more likely to be able to see the characters you are looking for. It’s easy to switch between modes at any point, using the “Use graphics” checkbox. (And if you preferred font glyphs as a default, you just need to change the URI in your bookmarked link slightly, and you can continue to work that way.)
To facilitate this change, I created my own graphics for a number of blocks which are not yet covered by decodeunicode, or which are no longer fully covered by decodeunicode. The blocks for which I provided graphics are Latin Extended-C, Latin Extended-D, Latin Extended Additional, Cyrillic Supplement, Cyrillic Extended-B, Modifier Tone Letters, Tibetan, Malayalam, Saurashtra, Ol Chiki, Myanmar, Kayah Li, Cham, Rejang, Vai, Supplemental Punctuation, and Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows.
There are still many characters for which there are no graphics (especially the new characters in Unicode 5.2), but coverage is much better than it was. As I find more fonts, I will be able to create graphics for the remaining characters.
I also put a grey box around the characters in tables. This is particularly useful if there are no graphics or font glyphs for a block or range of characters, as it makes it easier to locate the character you are looking for.
I also fixed a bug that was preventing Chrome and Safari and IE from displaying the first two Latin blocks. I think the bug was actually in the Unicode data file.