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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

#31

Post by yarlinghe »

chrismorgan wrote: post #23

> 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 o…

Yep — fully agree.

For modern HTML/CSS/JS, you should just write the character and serve UTF-8. The entities / codes are there purely as reference for legacy cases, debugging, or when you only have a code point and no rendered glyph — not as a recommendation for normal authoring.

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

#32

Post by yarlinghe »

WA wrote: post #22

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.

You’re right.

The abbreviations (arrows in particular) made scanning worse than it should be. I’ve pushed a quick update: full names on hover/focus, plus a Compact / Readable toggle for the grid.

Thanks for the nudge.

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

#33

Post by hnlmorg »

typeofhuman wrote: post #26

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.

I agree. Unicode references sites are numerous and yet this is one of the worst I’ve used in terms of distracting visual noise.

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

#35

Post by keepamovin »

phforms wrote: post #25
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…

Or maybe I just wasn't looking at the bottom! Thanks

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

#36

Post by yarlinghe »

arendtio wrote: post #20

Some constructive criticism: Please don't display text directly on the grid background image. It makes it impossible to read the text easily. Currently, this is the case when you open the page for a specific symbol in the 'Usage & Context' section.

Noted.

Fixed.

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

#37

Post by lejalv »

typeofhuman wrote: post #26

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.

It feels really noisy and specifically, not clean for me too, so much that it pushes me away. It's interesting and fortunate that it works for the author and some (most?) commentators.

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

#38

Post by Fileformat »

I run a couple similar sites:

FileFormat.Info[1] has a page per codepoint. It has been around awhile, so the UI isn't as whizzy, but it has all the data and works w/o JavaScript

UnicodeSearch[2] is an updated search UI that uses JavaScript and the excellent Tabulator grid widget.

There are actually a ton of similar sites with a page-per-codepoint. It is all fun to make one, until the bots come along and hammer every page.

[1] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2248/index.htm

[2] https://www.unicodesearch.org/

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

#39

Post by darrenf »

Fileformat wrote: post #38

I run a couple similar sites: FileFormat.Info[1] has a page per codepoint. It has been around awhile, so the UI isn't as whizzy, but it has all the data and works w/o JavaScript UnicodeSearch[2] is an updated search UI that uses JavaScript and the excellent Tabulator grid widget. There are actually a ton of similar sites with a page-per-codepoint. It is all fun to make one, until the bots come along and hammer every…

Long time fileformat.info user. here, just wanted to say thanks -- always found it incredibly useful for this exact purpose.

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

#40

Post by tantalor »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

Very nice. I found it odd, that tapping on a square “highlights” it, by making it “pop,” but nothing else really happens. It took me a bit to figure out that I need to actually select the arrow in the upper right corner, to get the page.

The arrow is too small to click on mobile
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