Unicode character look-up

Question

Now that I have switched to primarily using XeTeX, I find I do not use Detexify or the The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List to find symbols very much. However, I often still need to locate symbols. Frequently I find myself looking through character lists for individual fonts or browsing through dingbat collections On-line.

• Is there a handwritten symbol recognition tool for Unicode?
• Is there a search tool that helps find dingbats among the numerous available fonts?

Answer 1

For Linux, there are two nice character selectors, KCharSelect for KDE,

and Gucharmap for GNOME,

You can browse the various characters by script or Unicode block, or search by character description. Both programs are very nice, but personally, I prefer KCharSelect, as it has an incremental search bar which makes it faster to find the characters you need, and it displays all the information about a character, without you having to switch between the glyph ťab and the character information tab.

For Windows, you can use the built-in Character Map program, which supports Unicode in later versions of Windows:

Answer 2

For recognising characters, Shapecatcher is very similar to Detexify, but for unicode. I think this is what you're looking for.

Tables of characters are still useful when broken down properly. For example, if you're looking for a table of dingbats, then you can get that. All things unicode can be found from unicode.org, surprisingly enough! This link will take you directly to the library of charts.

Answer 3

Such tools may depend on your OS. On the Mac, there is something called the Character Viewer, which allows you to view all the Unicode characters either by character groupings or by code points. For any particular character, it will then display all of the fonts on your system that contain that particular character, and allows you to insert the character into an open document.