[Tex/LaTex] Unicode character look-up

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Now that I have switched to primarily using XeTeX, I find I do not use Detexify or the The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List to find symbols very much. However, I often still need to locate symbols. Frequently I find myself looking through character lists for individual fonts or browsing through dingbat collections On-line.

  • Is there a handwritten symbol recognition tool for Unicode?
  • Is there a search tool that helps find dingbats among the numerous available fonts?

Best Answer

For Linux, there are two nice character selectors, KCharSelect for KDE,

KCharSelect screenshot

and Gucharmap for GNOME,

Gucharmap screenshot

You can browse the various characters by script or Unicode block, or search by character description. Both programs are very nice, but personally, I prefer KCharSelect, as it has an incremental search bar which makes it faster to find the characters you need, and it displays all the information about a character, without you having to switch between the glyph ťab and the character information tab.

For Windows, you can use the built-in Character Map program, which supports Unicode in later versions of Windows:

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