Comfortable work with Unicode

The purpose of the note is to show one online service for viewing Unicode characters, since it is convenient to search for them in it, and compare it with many similar ones. From time to time it may be necessary to find among the multitude of text characters supported by a certain font, those that most accurately convey the idea or reflect the essence of the utterance. This has long been enjoyed by visitors to various social networks, where the expressive abilities of characters have long been appreciated and there are guides listing hundreds or other interesting characters. What kind? The most original and seemingly unnecessary to serious developers for whom this article is addressed: stars of different shapes, arrows, snowmen, watches, emotions.

Frontend developers need symbols to quickly prototype pages. Instead of spending time searching for or drawing a character, it is possible to find it in a font, for example, Arial or Helvetica, and create a temporary interface element. Sometimes you need to look and use symbols of a rare language, hieroglyphs. The variety of characters is already available in some fonts of some OS, it remains to "only" choose. In the programs and the OS itself there are tools for viewing and selecting characters of any system font ( example ). But these tools are not always convenient and do not always provide the necessary information. You need at least one online service to get it and quickly (try) to find the right one. Previously, the search for Unicode tables on the Internet helped, but they were depressed by their appearance, rarity and poor design. And here recently there is a service in which the creators decided to fix a number of annoying interface deficiencies of the search.

... As far as the ideal is concerned, the road is long, but what has been done in a few months makes you think and bookmark the site . There is potential for development. (At the end there are a lot of links to similar resources for comparison. If you look at everything with a picky look, you can make a number of remarks, say that there is room to grow. But you need to take into account that even in this form, the site bypasses analogs in terms of interface convenience and number of possibilities. )

Let's give the word to the creators of the site, taking a few lines from their page "About the project":

This project aimed to beautifully and most conveniently show a table of Unicode characters. Collect in one place everything that is known about each symbol, each range. Show which characters are used in the scripts of which countries of the world. We are constantly working to improve the site and the accuracy of translations into other languages. Accelerate loading pages. We have big plans for development.

As can be seen in comparison with various sites, a number of interface solutions are used in this resource, which are lacking in full in analogues.
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1 * . The characters represented in the general stream are rather large (18px).
2. Fields of characters fill the entire window without forcing to see differences in information content.
3 * . Mouse click - we see a particularly large character with a description in Russian and English.
4. On the right sidebar - hint what group of characters is observed on the screen.
5. In the same place - a map of the world with indication of the countries where symbols are used or applied, annotation to the group.
6 * . From sidebar - list with transition to different groups of characters by group names.
7. Autocompletion of the page when scrolling.
8 * . At the top is a search field where you can find characters by words from their descriptions.
9 * . Paradise for symbolobludov.
*) items with screenshots;

From the promise in the future:
* easier copying of characters;
* improved search for characters;
* use web fonts that are dynamically loaded for an unambiguous display of characters on any OS (now everything is observed only through the font-family style : Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; )

* Post from blog about unicode-table.com

Other sites representing Unicode characters.

* List of Unicode characters (Wikipedia - en) , characters are viewed through the default browser font.
* Characters presented in Unicode (Wikipedia - en) , links to Unicode character sets, located on different pages.
* Unicode Symbol Map from panmental.de , through the default browser font (sections are switched by selecting in the drop-down list on the right).
* http://copypastecharacter.com/symbols . Symbols on the flash, helping to copy to the clipboard by clicking.
* http://ivanov.in/upbar/symbols8.php . Hardcore HTML4 :).
* http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~tomw/java/unicode.html . Another hardcore.
* http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/en/general-info/unicode.html . In the form of tables.
* Unicode character table from 1 to 10,000 .

(Perhaps there are better ways to work with symbols. Links to such sites or programs are welcome in the comments.)