About the Unicode Sliderule

I wrote the "Unicode sliderule" because I kept running into Unicode characters that I wanted to enter, but didn't know how to type, or that I knew the hex code for but didn't know the appearance of, or that I had on the clipboard but wanted a transliteration of, and so on.

So, inspired by how a real sliderule (in days of yore) could do a jillion different things, I whipped up this bit of JavaScript to serve as many purposes as I could manage. I may even improve more it as I get better at JavaScript! Hooboy!

The way that the Unicode slide rule behaves depends on several things:

what fonts you have installed
your operating system's ability to deal with some exotic text behavior (like "combining characters", contextual character shaping, bidirectional text, etc)
and your browser's support for these features
and finally, some Unicode data that I got from Unicode.org, and yet more data from my own Perl Unidecode module.

If you want to download the Unicode slide rule as a zip file so you can run it locally, here it is. It's about a meg long. (Most of that space is taken up by the Chinese/Japanese/Korean character data.)

13 Feb 02005