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

The string analyser tool provides information about the characters in a string. One difference in this version is a new section “Data input as graphics”, where you see a horizontal sequence of graphics for each of the characters in the string you are analysing. This can be useful to get a screen snap of the characters. Of course, there is no combining or ligaturing behaviour involved – just a graphic per character.

You can reverse the character order for right-to-left scripts.

Another difference is that you can explode example text in the notes. Take this example: if you click on the Arabic word for Koran (red word near the bottom of the notes), you’ll see a pop-up window in the bottom right corner of the window that lists the characters in that word.

The other change is that the former “Related links” section in the sidebar is now called “Do more”, and the links carry the string you are analysing to the Converter or UniView apps.

Oh, and the page now remembers the options you set between refreshes, which makes life much easier.

The converter tool converts between characters and various escaped character formats. It was changed so that the “View names” button sends the characters to the string analyser tool. This means that you’ll now see graphics for the characters, and that, once on the string analyser page, you can change the amount of information displayed for each character (including showing font-based characters, if you need to).

I also fixed a bug related to the UTF-8 and UTF-16 input. Including spaces after the code values no longer fires off a bug.

PS: The string analyser tool has graphics for all new Unicode 6.0 characters, however I haven’t updated the data for those characters yet. I was planning to do so with the next release of UniView, which should be in October, when the final Unicode database is available.

>> 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: 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 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

>> 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.

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.

>> Use it

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.

>> Use it

With the family now in Japan, I had some extra time to spare this weekend, so I upgraded UniView to handle all the proposed characters for Unicode 5.2.

While the properties for new and modified characters are still in beta they are not officially stable, however the character allocations should be stable at this point. UniView therefore alerts you if you are looking at a new character.

If the Unicode database information has changed for a given character you are also warned, and provided with a link that points to the previous information for that character. These warnings will be removed from UniView when Unicode 5.2 is released.

Of course, you are unlikely to be able to actually see the new characters themselves, unless you are lucky enough to have a very new font to hand. The graphic alternatives are not available yet for these characters. I’m wondering whether it’s possible for me to do something about that, but that will take a little longer. In the meantime, you might find it more useful to view blocks in list view. (Click on ‘Show range as list’).

This release also fixes a few small bugs in the HTML and JavaScript code.

>> Use it !

The major changes in this version include a new feature to normalise text as NFC or NFD, the ability to accept decimal code point values, and an overhaul of top part of the user interface.

Added buttons to the Text area to allow conversion of the text to NFC or NFD normalization forms. (You may not notice the change until you list the characters.)

The control panel was also substantially rearranged again to hopefully make it easier for newcomers to see what they can do.

The Code point conversion feature was upgraded to handle decimal code point values.

A single character in the codepoints area or text area is now listed in the lower left panel when you click on , rather than in the right-hand properties panel. This is to improve consistency and avoid surprises.

Added a link to the CLDR property demo from the right panel to give access to additional properties.

Improved the parsing of codepoints when surrounded by text in the Code point input field, so that it now works with &#x…; and \u… and \U… escapes.

Jettisoned some unneeded code to reduce download by around 40-50K bytes. Implemented the NFC/NFD feature using AJAX, to avoid putting the download size back up.

When you delete the contents of the text area or the code point area, the associated input field is given focus, so you are ready for input.

A couple more minor bug fixes.

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.