Unicode character pickers

Pickers allow you to quickly create phrases in a script by clicking on Unicode characters arranged in a way that aids their identification. The phrase appears at the bottom of the screen and you can easily cut and paste the result into your own document. They're written in XHTML with a small amount of JavaScript.

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.

Descriptions

Arabic, Persian, Urdu: Includes the characters you need normally for Arabic, Persian and Urdu. For more unusual characters from the Arabic block see the Arabic block picker.

Arabic Block: Includes almost all characters in the Unicode Arabic block, plus some outside the block, such as quote marks and control characters. All characters are grouped by shape to aid in location. Available in English or French.

Armenian: Includes all characters in the Unicode Armenian block. Letters are arranged in the Unicode code page order, but upper and lower case letters are side by side. Available in English.

Bengali: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Bengali block. The default shows all characters as images due to the rarity of Bengali fonts. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Hinting is available. Available in English or French.

Devanagari: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Devanagari block. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Hinting is available. Available in English or French.

Basic Ethiopic: Includes all characters in the Unicode 4.0 Ethiopic block. It does not cover additions in Unicode version 4.1. Letters are arranged in the Unicode code page order, which is aligned with the traditional consonant-vowel matrix. .

Gujarati: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Gujarati block. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order.

Gurmukhi: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Gurmukhi block. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Hinting is available.

Hebrew: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Hebrew block. Similar characters are grouped together. Available in English or French.

IPA: Includes all the phonetic symbols listed in the alphabet section of the IPA site, with the exception of some contour tone/word accents and the symbols for disordered speech. Basic characters are grouped by articulatory position for easy location. Available in English or French.

Latin: Brings together the Latin characters in the Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, and Latin Extended Additional blocks. Also included are the characters in the Combining Diacritical Marks block. Characters are roughly arranged according to shapes in the English alphabet, then characters with diacritics above are followed by those with diacritics below, and then those with multiple diacritics.

Malayalam: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Malayalam block. The default shows all characters as images due to the rarity of Malayalam fonts. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Hinting is available. Available in English or French.

Myanmar: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Myanmar block. The default shows all characters as images due to the rarity of Malayalam fonts. Consonants are mostly in a typical articulatory arrangement, vowels are aligned with vowel signs, and digits are in keypad order. Hinting is implemented for visually similar glyphs.

Tamil: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Tamil block. Consonants are in a traditional Indian articulatory arrangement, vowels aligned with vowel signs, and digits in keypad order. Available in English or French.

Thai: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Thai block. Characters are grouped by shape or type to enable easy identification. Available in English or French.

Tibetan: Includes all the characters in the Unicode Tibetan block. The default shows all characters as images due to the rarity of Tibetan fonts. Consonants are mostly in a typical articulatory arrangement, with vowels below, and digits in keypad order. Since characters cover the whole Tibetan block, there are many characters that are used for transcriptions rather than just the characters needed for ordinary Tibetan text.

Tifinagh Kbd [ma]: Includes characters needed in Morocco to represent the Berber script. Unicode codes are expected to be standardised in Unicode 4.1. Letters are arranged in approximately the same arrangement as the IRCAM keyboard. Get the Hapax Berbère font.

Many thanks to Patrick Andries for the French translations !

How to use

Click on the characters in the character grid to see them appear in the box below.

In some newer pickers, combining characters appear on a light-shaded background.

When you initially load a page, most of the characters in the character grid will be displayed as text, but the combining characters will be displayed as images. To the far right of the control area you will usually find two buttons that switch the character list to all graphics or all text. For older pickers, to once more see just the combining characters as images and the rest as text, reload the page. Newer pickers will never convert combining characters to text.

You can also type directly into the box. This is useful for adding characters from another script (eg. ASCII). Note that, while you can manually move the cursor to any point in the box text and type or delete characters using your keyboard, or even move text around by cut and paste, clicking on the characters in the grid above will only append to the end of the text. (Of course, if you need to, you can then manually move that to a different location by cutting & pasting.)

Hinting is initially turned on in some pickers. Currently this is limited to shape matching, but I am considering implementing a phonetic matching alternative for the future. Shape matching highlights characters with similar shapes that are not side by side. It makes it easier for people who are unfamiliar with the script to locate characters. You can turn this off.

Controls at the top or bottom allow you to modify various aspects of the tool, including fonts used and font size, the height of the output box, and shape matching. They also allow you to insert special characters or spaces, and delete the last character or delete all the text to start afresh.

When you have finished creating your string, click on the "Select all" button and copy and paste the text into your document.