Latin character picker

• Shape
• Font grid

Notes:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Click on characters/shapes to insert text into the output field or use your keyboard for Latin characters, delete, etc. You can also add codepoints and escapes via the "Add codepoint" field (hit return to add to the output field).

Then cut & paste the result to your document, or use the tabs to get further information about the characters. You can also paste text into the output field to get information about it. Use the yellow box to set preferences or search (regular expressions allowed - for example, to find the letter GA, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

There are well over a thousand characters in this picker, so the usual approach of showing each character as a graphic image has been avoided, in favour of displaying font glyphs. This dramatically speeds up the loading of the page, but makes it more difficult to see the characters if you don't have the right fonts. I suggest you install the free Charis SIL, Doulos SIL or GentiumPlus fonts. They cover nearly all the characters you'll need. (Combining characters are still rendered using graphics.)

About the chart

Includes all characters from the following character blocks in Unicode 5.2: Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, Latin Extended-C, Latin Extended-D, Latin Extended Additional, IPA Extensions, Phonetic Extensions, Phonetic Extensions Supplement. This covers Latin and phonetic characters.

All text is output in Unicode normalisation form NFC by default. You can change to NFD or no normalisation by clicking on the buttons in the yellow area. Note that normalization only takes place when you click on a character - text pasted into the box won't be normalised until you click on another character above, or click on a button in the yellow area. (Note: normalization is turned off for Han characters in this application.)

Alternative views

The following alternative views are available from the menu just below the page title. You can start up directly in one of the views by appending the following to your URI: ?view=, followed by one of, respectively, shape or fontgrid.

Shape Characters are mostly grouped by association with the shapes of ASCII letters (though sometimes this includes various possible shapes for a letter), so, for example, the long s with high stroke can be found next to f. There are also separate groups for combining marks. Within a group, characters are grouped first by shape. Capitals are grouped separately to lowercase. Then they are ordered so that similar shapes are close by each other. Where characters have diacritics, the higher the diacritic, the nearer it will be to the beginning of the group..

It isn't easy to develop an all-embracing theory for the ordering of so many characters in the time I have available, but hopefully what I did will prove workable enough.

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

Some characters are repeated in the font grid. This is because the list is generated from the list of characters in the shape view. Some characters are similar to more than one other character visually, and are therefore included in more than one place in the shape view. These are the characters that end up as duplicates in the font grid view. There are not many.

Other commands

Other info For further information about features of the tool or user interface, see How to use.

Useful URIs

SIL fonts

Other downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood

Other pickers

If something is missing

... let me know.