tifinagh character picker

Notes:

Quick start

(You must have JavaScript enabled.) Choose a view (see below). 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 surrounded by spaces in the name, enter \bga\b, or the short form :ga:).

About the chart

Includes all the characters in the Unicode Tifinagh block.

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 by clicking 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, default, shape, keyboard, transcription or fontgrid.

Default This view is likely to be most useful to people who are somewhat familiar with the alphabet and characters of Tifinagh.

Characters are arranged in the order of the Unicode block; that is, in IRCAM alphabetic order, with additional characters interspersed according to pronunciation.

Shape This view is purely based around shape, and is therefore good when you don't know the script well at all, or for shapes you don't know. Characters are grouped and ordered by visual similarity.

Each orange key near the top of the page represents a significant part of the shape of two or more characters; as you mouse over the keys, characters and combinations of characters that incorporate that shape are displayed below. Click on these characters to add them to the output. Within a group I attempted to put easily confusable characters close to each other.

The shapes below the grey line are a mixed bag of characters that didn't fit elsewhere.

For the Tifinagh picker, a key groups characters with the base shape in any rotation, since many of the variants arise solely from orientation of the basic shape. Also, some characters are repeated with different font glyphs, where there is enough of a difference to cause doubt.

A small orange plus sign to the right of a shape indicates that you will find similar shapes after the large plus sign to the right of the current line. These characters may cause confusion because they share elements, or because their shape may be similar, though not quite the same.

Keyboard Shows characters in order of the extended IRCAM keyboard. Only the Tifinagh characters and numbers are shown (it is assumed that you can get the rest from your keyboard).

Transcription I use this for typing in text for which I have a transcription, or for creating phonemic transcriptions.

The large characters on a grey background represent a rough cut at the Berber Latin transcription used in particular for northern Berber transcriptions of Neo-Tifinagh. This still needs a little refinement (suggestions welcome). To type Tifinagh text starting from a transcription, click on these characters. If there is only one Tifinagh character corresponding to the transcription letter, it is inserted directly into the output field. If there are multiple alternatives, these are presented to you in a selection list: click on the Tifinagh character you need in the selection list and it is added to the output.

Each Tifinagh character is associated with a phonetic symbol (a Latin/IPA symbol on white background to its left in the selection lists). If there is more than one possible phonic representation you will see the selection list divided appropriately. As you select characters, the phonetic symbol to its left is stored. If you click on the Phonemes button, below the output area, these are all added to the output. This provides a quick way of generating a phonetic transcription from a Latin transcription. In some cases a Tifinagh character is repeated within the same selection list because it has more than one possible phonetic equivalent - in such cases, choose the right one if you want to generate this phonetic transcription.

The unmarked schwa box can be used when you don't want the Tifinagh output to show anything between consonants, but you want the phonetic output to show an epenthetic schwa.

Just above the output area there is a line of Latin characters. This represents the union of all transcription and phonetic characters, and is provided in case you wish to just type in a transcription directly.

As you mouse over the Latin characters on the grey background, the corresponding Tifinagh characters are also displayed near the top of the page. This is to aid in searching, but you can also select characters from there.

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).

Special commands

Phonemes While you click on Tifinagh characters in the Transcription view, the picker automatically records in a buffer the associated phonemic character (ie. the nearest transciption character to the left of each character you click on). Clicking on this icon will dump those characters into the output area at the current cursor position, and clear the buffer. It is quite basic (for example, it doesn't take into account backspacing), but is offered as a way of speeding up text entry where you want to type both the Tifinagh characters and the phonemic transcription. Transcribed tone marks are provided at the bottom: you currently need to add tones to the transcription afterwards by positioning the cursor in the right place and clicking on one of these graphics.

Other features

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

Useful URIs

Downloadable TrueType and OpenType fonts: Wazu Japan, Alan Wood, IRCAM

Tifinagh in Wikipedia, Berber Latin alphabet in Wikipedia

Tifinagh block in UniView

Other pickers

If something is missing

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