Unicode Resources

Created by rebecca with major help from @FakeUnicode

Unicode is a standard “registry” of characters designed to catalogue all the world’s writing systems and serve as a superset of all previously-existing character sets used and supported by just about everyone and all their software. Get into the details on Stack Overflow or see some of the Unicode encodings on Wikipedia.

Charts and character data

PDF charts on unicode.org — The only complete and perpetually up-to-date reference.

List of Unicode blocks on Wikipedia — Also available as a TXT file on unicode.org

UNIDATA on unicode.org — “This directory contains the final data files for the Unicode Character Database, for Version 8.0.0 of the Unicode Standard.”

CopyPasteCharacter — Contains a bunch of common characters for easy copying.

Proposed new characters on unicode.org

Unicode planes reference — Confused about what “BMP” means? Check here.

String analysis

Unicode Inspector — By @timwhitlock, displays the codepoint, byte breakdown, block, symbol, name, and surrogates for each character in a string.

Scarfboy search and string analysis

Understanding UTF-8 on jsfiddle — By @FakeUnicode on Twitter. Displays binary/hex breakdown of strings of text.

What Unicode character is this? — By BabelStone.

Search

Scarfboy search and string analysis

codepoints.net — Powerful search engine with previews in Unifont

&what;

FileFormat.info

charcod.es

Shape recognition

shapecatcher — Recognizes Unicode characters through a drawing field.

Kanji search on jisho.org — Find kanji characters by their parts.

Handwritten kanji recognition — Like shapecatcher for kanji.

Google Translate — Click the pencil icon in the input area to enable shape recognition. Great for writing short bits of text in a language you don’t know.

Conversion (programming)

Xem’s EscApe utility on Github — By Maxime Euzière. Converts any Unicode string to a bunch of different escape sequence syntaxes.

ASCII Xlate — Converts plain ASCII, binary, octal, hex, base32, base64, ASCII85, and decimal ASCII. Also calculates various hashes!

Guide to converting to UTF-8 in various programming languages

Conversion (decorative or linguistic)

Unicate — Converts to various Latin Unicode “alphabets” (e.g. full-width, math scripts, etc.).

Text converter on qaz.wtf — Similar to the above.

Zalgo generator on eeemo.net — generates Zalgo text.

Convert Text on the Chrome web store — Converts the case of text as a Chrome extension. Includes Zalgo generator and fullwidth transform.

Strikethrough converter — By Adam Varga.

Emojify text on jsfiddle — By @FakeUnicode on Twitter. Transforms text to emoji.

Acrostic generator — Dubiously useful. Also converts to Unicode Math Monospace.

Abbreviator — Saves characters in tweets by using precomposed characters.

Unitools — A good compilation of a bunch of other tools. Honorary mention.

Braille converter

Coverage: fonts & support

Alan Wood’s Unicode font list — Probably the most complete list of high-coverage fonts.

PragmataPro — A monospaced programming font with 6,000 glyphs (and rising).

CharacterMap — Analyzes glyphs from font files.

Google Noto Fonts — A set of sans and serif fonts supporting 581 languages (as of April 2016), with about 50% glyph coverage.

Unicode fonts by writing system

Preview of all codepoints in the BMP — Useful for testing coverage.

GNU Unifont

BabelStone’s Han font

Everson Mono font

Hanazono font

Code2000 font

Emoji

Full Emoji Charts — all emoji with comparison pictures of implementations on various platforms.

Emoji Symbols: Background Data on unicode.org, a.k.a. (L2/09-027) — Japanese carrier background data for the original emoji import (mostly historic value).

List of proposals and their associated codepoints on Wikipedia

Possible upcoming emoji on unicode.org

List of emoji ZWJ ligatures on unicode.org — Note: These are not actually emoji or part of the Unicode standard. Implementation, support, and blame lies entirely with the third parties involved.

Text vs Emoji reference on unicode.org — Shows which characters (should) render as emoji or text.