Shapecatcher
Shapecatcher is a new website, that helps you to find specific Unicode characters, just by sketching their shape. Currently about 10000 of the most important Unicode characters are compared to your sketch and are analysed for similarities.
Cost / License
- Free
- Proprietary
EUPlatforms
- Online
Features
- Ad-free
- No registration required
- Support for Unicode
- Typography
- Sketch
- Handwriting recognition
- Character database
- Sketching
Tags
- character-recognition
- typeface
- Search Engine
- recognition
- unicode-characters
Shapecatcher News & Activities
Recent activities
- belleor liked Shapecatcher
jf-charactermap added Shapecatcher as alternative to CharacterMap
POX added Shapecatcher as alternative to UnicodePad
What is Shapecatcher?
Shapecatcher is a new website, that helps you to find specific Unicode characters, just by sketching their shape. Currently about 10000 of the most important Unicode characters are compared to your sketch and are analysed for similarities. It can find the most similar character shapes for your drawing.
Under the hood, Shapecatcher uses so called "shape contexts" to find similarities between two shapes. Shape contexts, a robust mathematical way of describing the concept of similarity between shapes, is a feature descriptor first proposed by Serge Belongie and Jitendra Malik.
Shapecatcher information
Developed by
Benjamin Milde Licensing
Proprietary and Free product.Alternatives
17 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
Comments and Reviews
This site is very interesting, fun, and informational. You can learn much from the shapes you draw
Shapecatcher is excellent for language study, although it should be noted that CJKV characters are not really supported (the author acknowledges this, and has little time for development, although I am sure throwing money his way would help).
Here is the site announcement thread: https://redd.it/m42kc
Be sure to also check out Detexify for TeX, which I will add as an alternative soon.
This app is a gem. Using it frequently and never had let me down.
Shapecatcher recognizes quickly and well, presents a comprehensive list of prospective characters that is still easy to find the looked for character in, and loads quickly & works well on mobile (even over a slower cellular data connection).