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.