First thing I thought of when I saw Shapecatcher was Detexify. The similarities are obvious, it was most likely his true inspiration, or at least part of it, yet he didn't mention in the about page.
I just ran across detexify today while trying to remember what \gtrsim was called... Quite a coincidence to find the unicode equivalent on HN a few hours later.
I thought it said "unicorn". I was dismayed to find that my beautiful, refrigerator-worthy rendering of a unicorn was interpreted as a few Arabic characters, some arrows, and a domino tile.
Great concept, but 1 for 5 in recognition. Matched dollar sign. No euro, no pound, no ampersand, no pi? Maybe I'm a horrible artist, but 49 suggestions (some that look like pi) and no pi?
One thing they could do to help alleviate this is favor the Unicode section(s) associated with the visitor's language, as well as punctuation. That way we'd be less likely to get results like "Ogham letter nion: ᚅ" for drawing pi.
I tried the ae ligature, long s, sharp s, Russian zha, Greek capital gamma, and a heart, and of those only the gamma was in the top five (it was #2); zha, ae, and heart weren't even in the list, and long-s and sharp-s were waaay down the list. (Actually, I just tried it with a better-drawn sharp-s and it didn't even turn up.) In some cases the top choices really do resemble the letter I was looking for, so that's fine, but there's a lot that shows up that resembles the canonical form a lot less than my drawing does.
So, not quite ready for prime time, I think. Cool idea, though.
I really wish font handling and rendering were a bit simpler to understand and troubleshoot in Linux.
Recently I had an annoying problem where some web pages weren't rendering the fonts correctly. It turned out the reason was a font config file for a Chinese bitmap font was causing firefox's font rendering to alter - both chromium and another browser were working as expected (according to the css rules). Tracking down the problem took several weeks and several dead ends and I only stumbled on the answer by accident anyway.
Very cool. Would be useful to see a section of neighboring glyphs in the area of a selected glyph (I want to find the spade suit and see some other suit glyphs too)
I was recently searching for a unicode Thumbs Up, and came up empty handed (there is none). So I drew one in this thing, and got some useful approximations at least:
ຢ ථ
I also came across this one, describe as "weary cat face":
🙀
Seriously, Unicode? You've got "weary cat face", but no thumbs up? I am disappoint.
I noticed that the second attempt had more accuracy than the first since I was able to see a similar character (white rook) and then modify my crude drawing to eliminate extra information that was adding white noise to the search. Nice work!
Yeah, I encountered the same issue. The only thing I can think of is that I'm drawing them in the handwritten style, but the recognizer probably needs them to be in the digital font style.
This is top notch. Any chance you would make this so that you could embed it in another website - maybe for a cost/month? because I can think of some sites right now that could really use this.
Very useful, fun and even has research value. Draw a circle and find a lot of emoticons. I couldn't find any of the letters from my mother tongue though, hopefully they will be added.
I actually got the snowman as the 8th result when trying (and failing) to draw the unicode character "pile of poo" U+1F44D: http://i.imgur.com/VBvK6.jpg
Interesting. I actually tried a few different variations of Jupiter's symbol (like making the curve more or less exaggerated, higher and lower, etc.) and couldn't get it to work.
