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

Disclaimers Note that I make no claim to have produced polished, compact or well-optimised code! The code does what I need, and I’m happy with that. You are welcome to suggest improvements, and I’m sure there are many that could be made.

As they say, this code is made available in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The code is a little more convoluted that it ought to be, to get around the fact that JavaScript doesn’t understand supplementary characters, and PHP just doesn’t naturally understand Unicode. (How I long for PHP6.)

Update: [[I meant to mention that there is a way of doing normalization in PHP already. I made this code available just because I had it. I created it as a learning exercise. It may be useful, however, if you are unable to load the ICU and intl packages onto your server.]]

To use the code, simply call nfc('your-text-string') or nfd('your-text-string') from your code and capture the result.

For PHP you’ll need these routines and this data.

For JavaScript look at these routines and this data. There is also a lite version of the data file that doesn’t include Han characters. I use this sometimes for bandwidth savings (about 14K less).

Test files I also created some test files for PHP and for JavaScript.
Both of these expect to find a copy of http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NormalizationTest.txt in the local directory. These files run 71,076 tests.

Cautions Be careful about the editor you use for the data files. I spent several hours fruitlessly debugging the routines, only to find that Notepad++ was displaying certain supplementary characters ok, but corrupting them on save. I switched to Notepad and the problem evaporated. And I probably don’t need to add that editing the data files in something like DreamWeaver is a bad idea because it will probably normalize the data before saving.

Another point: you may see Unicode replacement characters at a couple of points in the PHP source. These represent the first and last characters in the high surrogate range.

Experimenting If you want to play with something that uses this you could try my Tłįchǫ (Dogrib) character picker, or my Normalizer tool. I will slowly fit this to all the pickers and to UniView. I have a local version of UniView waiting in the wings that uses the PHP files via AJAX, to reduce download size. For that you need a file that returns the result as plain text across the wire, such as this.

Well, I hope that that may be of use to someone, somewhere. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.

>> Use it !

The main change in this version is the reworking of the former Cut & paste and Code point(s) fields to make it easier to use UniView as a generalised picker.

Moved the cut&paste field downwards, made it larger, and changed the label to character area. This should make it easier to deal with text copy/cut & paste, and more obvious that that is possible with UniView. It is much clearer now that UniView provides character map/picker functionality, and not just character lookup.

Whereas previously you had to double-click to put a character in the lower left pane into the Cut&paste field, UniView now echoes characters to the Character area every time you (single) click on a character in the lower left hand pane. This can be turned off. Double-clicking will still add the codepoint of a character in the lower left panel to the Code points field.

The Character area has its own set of icons, some of which are new: ie. you can select the text, add a space, and change the font of the text in the area (as well as turn the echo on and off). I also spruced up the icons on the UI in general.

Note that on most browsers you can insert characters at the point in the Character area where you set the cursor, or you can overwrite a highlight range of characters, whereas (because of the non-standard way it handles selections and ranges) Internet Explorer will always add characters to the end of the line.

The Code points field has also been enlarged, and I moved the Show list pull-down to the left and Show as graphics and Show page as list to the right. This puts all the main commands for creating lists together on the left.

When you mouse over character in the lower left pane you now see both hex and decimal codepoint information. (Previously you just saw an unlabelled decimal number.) You will also find decimal code point values for characters displayed in the lower right panel.

Fixed a bug in the Code points input feature so that trailing spaces no longer produce errors, but also went much further than that. You can now add random text containing codepoints or most types of hex-based escaped characters to the input field, and UniView will seek them out to create the list. For example, if you paste the following into the Code points field:

the decomposition mapping is <U+CE20, U+11B8>, and not <U+110E, U+1173, U+11B8>.

the result will be:

CE20: 츠 [Hangul Syllables]
11B8: ᆸ HANGUL JONGSEONG PIEUP
110E: ᄎ HANGUL CHOSEONG CHIEUCH
1173: ᅳ HANGUL JUNGSEONG EU
11B8: ᆸ HANGUL JONGSEONG PIEUP

Of course, UniView is not able to tell that an ordinary word like ‘Abba’ is not a hex codepoint, so you obviously need to watch out for that and a few other situations, but much of the time this should make it much easier to extract codepoint information.

I still haven’t found a way to fix the display bug in Safari and Google Chrome that causes initial content in the lower left pane to be only partially displayed.

I have just upgraded the Malayalam picker to level 7, and added a bunch of new features that should show up in other pickers at level 7 as I get time:

Shape view The pickers are aimed particularly at people who are not familiar enough with a script to use the keyboard. However, there are many ligatures and conjuncts in Malayalam, which makes it difficult to identify the character sequences needed. This view provides most of the shapes you’ll see in Malayalam text, grouped by shape. It’s something I’ve been wanting to add to the pickers for some time.

Phonic view This has been done in other pickers, but it has some new features over those. The sounds have been arranged along similar lines to a standard IPA chart, and multiple transcriptions are supported. In addition, you can click on the transcription text to build up a phonemic string in IPA. This is particularly useful for creating examples.

Regular expressions in searches The search feature was upgraded to allow for regular expressions. So now you can highlight characters containing GA without highlighting ones containing NGA: just search for \bga\b (or use the convenient short-cut form .ga.). Of course you can do more complicated searches too.

Add codepoint You can add a hex codepoint value to the box in the yellow area to insert into the text. This is useful for things like the odd unusual character, or for just figuring out what a sequence of codepoints represents. You can input any number of codepoints (including surrogates) into the input box, separating them by spaces.

Chillus This version of the picker supports all Unicode 5.1 characters, including the chillu characters. Because most Malayalam fonts support the old way of inputting chillu forms, you can specify in the yellow box area what you want the output to be when clicking on a chillu letter: the pre-5.1 sequence or the new atomic character. (The default is the atomic character.)

The picker also comes with the usual set of level 7 features, such as font grid view, graphic characters, hiding of uncommon characters, optimised ordering of characters in the alphabetic view, two-tone highlighting, etc.

You can start up directly in either of the available views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, shape, phonic or fontgrid.

Enjoy.

I finally got to the point, after many long early morning hours, where I felt I could remove the ‘Draft’ from the heading of my Myanmar (Burmese) script notes.

This page is the result of my explorations into how the Myanmar script is used for the Burmese language in the context of the Unicode Myanmar block. It takes into account the significant changes introduced in Unicode version 5.1 in April of this year.

Btw, if you have JavaScript running you can get a list of characters in the examples by mousing over them. If you don’t have JS, you can link to the same information.

There’s also a PDF version, if you don’t want to install the (free) fonts pointed to for the examples.

Here is a summary of the script:

So, what next. I’m quite keen to get to Mongolian. That looks really complicated. But I’ve been telling myself for a while that I ought to look at Malayalam or Tamil, so I think I’ll try Malayalam.

I have just upgraded the Burmese picker as follows:

Rearranged characters The Myanmar3 font expects multiple combining characters to be entered in the order described in the Unicode 5.1 Standard for correct display. The panel of combining characters has been arranged so that you can easily remember what that order was. Characters to the left precede those to the right, characters higher up precede those lower down.

In addition to that, I have rearranged all the character positions so that it is easier to locate the various parts of a syllable as you type.

I also added some combinations of characters that make up multi-part vowels and the kinzi with a single click.

I have also moved some of the less common characters to an ‘advanced’ area to the right which can be opened and closed by clicking on the arrow-head icon.

New highlighting As you mouse over a character the picker will show you other characters that are visually similar (particularly useful for those not very familiar with the script). This new version shows the more likely confusable characters with a blue outline, and other similar characters with orange. This is useful given that many Myanmar characters look quite similar.

As always, you can turn off this feature or disable it in the URI you use to call the picker.

Font grid view Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

You can start up directly in either of the available views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet or fontgrid.

Enjoy.

This latest picker includes all characters in the Unicode Lao block, plus a few punctuation characters. There are several alternative views.

Alphabetic By default, characters are arranged by groups, and consonants and vowels are listed in alphabetic order. Digits are in keypad order. Similar characters are highlighted by default, but this can be switched off using the ‘Hint’ selector.

Tone marks and combining vowels are reordered automatically so that vowels come first in the output character sequence.

Phonic Characters are grouped and ordered by sound. I set this up for myself to enter Lao text that I wanted to copy that was accompanied by a transcription. Initial consonants are followed by tones and consonants that come second in a cluster, then vowels. Alternatives with the same sound are separated by a red dot. Consonants that have different sounds when word final are also listed under those sounds. (Dropped aspiration is not considered significant.)

Dashes representing consonants indicate which vowels are non-final or occur before the consonant. Where a vowel has a part that comes before a consonant, a single click should arrange the parts properly. This behaviour speeds up typing. It may not be so intuitive to people familiar with Lao, however, since it makes Lao behave like Khmer and Indic scripts.

You should add any tone mark before the vowel and the picker will automatically reorder characters as needed. If you want to wrap text around a combination of two syllable-initial characters, type the characters then click on ‘flag as cluster’ before clicking on the tone mark or vowel.

Two old vowel spellings are only displayed if you click on the grey arrow, top right.

Font grid Shows characters in Unicode order, using whatever font is specified in the Font list or Custom font input fields. This allows comparison of fonts (especially useful in IE, which shows if a glyph is missing from a font).

You can start up directly in one of the above views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, alphabet, phonic or fontgrid.

Enjoy.