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Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

fontgenerator.design

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Re: Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

#22

Post by WA »

Nice, but way too many abbreviated descriptions and no way to see the full name of a symbol without clicking on it. Needs a tooltip / title.

Or better, if 90% of all symbol names are abbreviated, your design simply doesn't work. This is especially apparent in the "arrows" section.

Re: Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

#23

Post by chrismorgan »

> Use an HTML entity, a decimal code, or a hex code.

Please no: just write the character. need to be encoded; a few others have arguable benefit to being encoded (most notably NO-BREAK SPACE), but most Unicode characters should just be put in literally. The days when you couldn’t be confident of the file encoding are past: your HTML is being served as UTF-8 (or in the rare case it isn’t, you should fix that instead of avoiding non-ASCII in the source).

Same deal with CSS (" and \ are the only ones you need to escape) and JavaScript (" or ' or `, as appropriate).

URLs? Occasionally you may encounter a legacy system where you need to percent-encode it yourself (similarly around punycoding internationalised domain names), but you can almost always (and thus, in my opinion, should) just write it and leave anything that wants it to be ASCII to perform the percent-encoding itself.

Excel I can’t comment on, but I presume you can just write "≈" and UNICHAR should almost never be used.

Re: Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

#25

Post by phforms »

keepamovin wrote: post #19

This is beautiful. Love the design. When I read the title I thought it was "one page per Unicode" so I click on the codes and hope a page will open with a giant Unicode where I can see about it in details. Oh well! Still good. When I click the "Click to copy" my UI reflex tells me to look for a "Copied!" or similar acknowledgement. But I don't see one, so there's uncertainty if it was copied safely to my invisible cl…

Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).

There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.

Re: Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

#26

Post by typeofhuman »

No disrespect but I would not call this "clean". The design is overwhelmingly cluttered and distracting. Especially given that each symbol is obscured by a black square with an arrow covering it. The symbols are themselves very small.

Maybe get rid of all the noise and just display the symbols in a nice grid without all the fluff or layers.

Re: Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

#27

Post by troupo »

yarlinghe wrote: post #14
jdeisenberg wrote: post #8

I’m looking at the currency block. Each box has a colored “drop shadow”. I spent a minute or so trying to figure out what the significance of the color is. Finally, I noticed that the color appears to cycle between cyan, magenta, and yellow. Is this a design element only, or do the colors actually have some meaning with respect to the symbol?

Purely cosmetic. In hindsight, probably unnecessary — but once you add color, it’s hard to stop

I was going to complain about something or other in the design but then stopped myself: we don't get enough quirky designs as it is.
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