Updated Wed 7 Nov 2018 • tags uniview, apps
UniView is a Web-based application for working with Unicode characters. No need to install anything – just open in a browser. You can look up or find characters (using graphics or fonts) and related information, view whole character blocks or custom ranges, select characters to paste into your document, paste in and discover unknown characters, search for characters using regular expressions, do hex/dec/ncr conversions, highlight character types, etc. etc. It supports Unicode 15.0 and is written with Web Standards to work on a variety of browsers.
You can find the source code on github, and a list of recent changes. See also the change log for a summary of changes in each release. If you spot a bug, please raise a github issue.
Click on the area you need help with:
To get started, either:
button to list the characters.UniView produces tables or lists of characters in the Character list panel (lower left).
Clicking/tapping on characters in a table or list displays detailed information for them in the right-hand part of the page. Double-clicking/tapping adds the character to the text area. To move all characters to the text area, click on 
.
The control with the placeholder text "Find a block name" helps you find a block when you don't know how the name starts, or find a list of blocks with names that share the same text.
Just below that control is a pulldown control that lists all Unicode blocks, grouped by type or region.
Click on the 
icon to refresh the results.
For example, to find a Pahlavi block, start typing 'pah'. You'll see the following:
Click on either of the block names. The name will appear in the field where you typed 'pah'. Chrome and Safari will immediately show the Unicode block you chose, but for Firefox you will need to hit return to show the block.
Notes:
If you type or paste a start and end code point value (in hex) into this control, the characters in the range will display below. Note that this can only be one contiguous range.
Click on the icon to refresh the results.
If the range you select does not fill a whole column when displayed as a table, surrounding characters are greyed out. (When displaying as a list, you will only see the characters in the range.)
The range field will accept various formats, making it easier to paste a range from elsewhere. The numbers must be in hexadecimal form but can be separated by either a colon (the default), a hyphen, one or more spaces, or one or more periods. The code point values themselves can be in the following formats: 1234, ሴ, \1234;, \u1234, U+1234. The actual number of hex digits can be between 1 and 6.
Notes:
This control accepts a list of codepoint values in hexadecimal or decimal, a list of characters or a search string. After adding content to the input box, click on the appropriate button above the control to activate lookup. (If the correct button was already highlighted, you could just hit Enter or click on 
. )
Click on 
to quickly clear the control.
By default the control expects hex codepoint values. To look up a decimal value, click on the Dec button.
This field is very forgiving about the format of the text entered into the box. Most types of character escapes will be recognised, and you can even paste in surrounding text. For example, UniView will detect and list the characters referred to by code point in the text "the decomposition mapping is <U+CE20, U+11B8>, and not <U+110E, U+1173, U+11B8>." Of course, this is not foolproof, but should provide the desired results most of the time.
If the Characters button is selected, each character in the control will be processed. (Much of the time you will probably find it easier to use the text area for this, but this control can be used if you want to look up some characters without disturbing a set of characters you are building up or using in the text area.)
By selecting the Text button you can search for text in the Unicode database, and returns a list of matching characters.
You can use regular expressions in searches. For example, suppose you wanted to
find all characters with the word 'tet'. You could type into the input field, \btet\b. The \b represents a word boundary. If you wanted to search for entries containing either the word 'tet' or the word 'tat' you can use the 'or' operator | as in \btet\b|\btat\b. (In UniView a colon can be used as a short form of \b so the example could have been written :tet:).
Another example: You want to search for 'alpha', but you only want results for the Latin characters (not the many Greek or
mathematical results). Simply use the following search string latin.*alpha. The .* represents any number of intervening
characters.
Basic regular expressions that work in JavaScript code should work.
By default searches match against character names and alternative names in the main Unicode database, and also searches the information displayed for an individual character under the heading Description in the right panel. You can limit the search using the Names, Descriptions and Other check boxes that appear below the input box. Other refers to alternative names. If you want to set these before searching, just click on the Text button with nothing in the input box. It will bring up the checkboxes, which you can set as required. Then just enter your search string and click again on the Text button.
You can also limit the search to the characters currently in a list or table. To limit the search, select the check box labelled Local. Matching characters will be highlighted. (You can then produce a list of just the highlighted characters by clicking on the icon next to Filter > Make list from highlights. If you need to refine your search, you could then search again on this list, and so on.)
To clear the highlighting after doing a local search, just clear the Find input box, and hit the Search button again.
If the check box is selected, characters (apart from those in the text area and notes area) will be shown as images, rather than text.
Dedicated images are available for all characters except for those in the large Han, Hangul and Tangut blocks. Many of those characters are however also available thanks to an agreement with the folks who run the decodeunicode server.
If you want to find fonts, check out the script resource pages. When you select a Unicode block, a pointer to the relevant page appears at the top right of the panel.
If the check box is selected when you want to display a Unicode block or range, the characters will be displayed as a list, rather than a table.
You can also use this to switch between table and list views of a range you have just selected.
If you display information about a character in the Character details panel (lower right) and there are notes available for that character they will be displayed at the bottom of the page if this control is selected.
Not all characters have associated notes. When Show block is turned on, characters in the matrix for which there are notes are highlighted with an orange bar below. See the example here:
The notes are not authoritative. They are compiled by myself as I learn about various scripts and characters. They are made available in case they are of use, but you should not assume that they are always correct, and they are certainly not complete.
The block info link appears when you select a block for display. Click on it to open a page of useful links related to that block. (The page opens in another window.)
The Text area is associated with a set of controls for managing characters as text. It makes UniView like a character map or picker tool, but also much more. You can add characters to the text area from other parts of UniView, or you can simply paste text into it for analysis.
The insertion point for characters echoed to the text area can be changed in most browsers by just clicking where you want characters to appear. If you highlight a range of text, any typed or echoed characters will replace the highlighted range.
Text area controls. You can interact with the text in the text area using the icons below it. They are described here:
Creates a list in the Character list panel of the characters in the Text area. This is particularly useful for investigating text with characters you can't see or correctly identify. Simply paste the text into the text area and click on this icon, and UniView will produce a list of the names and code points for all the characters in the text area.
Copies to the Text area all the characters currently displayed in a list or table in the Character list panel. This is particularly useful for capturing search results, or making a list of all characters in a block, etc.
If you have filtered out characters in the Character list panel, only the unfiltered characters will be added to the text area.
Highlights all the text in the box. (Particularly useful to check you have caught all combining characters when copy-pasting to another location.)
Adds spaces between each of the characters in the text area. This is useful for generating space-separated lists of characters, or sometimes just for making it easier to see what characters are in the text area.
Removes whitespace from between each of the characters in the text area. (This can be useful for counting characters, see below).
Adds commas between each of the characters in the text area. This is useful for generating comma-separated lists of characters to be copy-pasted elsewhere.
Note: If you are using UniView on an iPad in portrait mode, this control is not available.
Any hyphen-separated lists in the text area are expanded. For example, if you have A-Z in the text box, it will be replaced with ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. You can expand multiple ranges at the same time. For example, A-Za-z0-9 will expand to include all intervening characters for the three ranges specified.
Allows you to convert a list of items on a single line to a vertical list. Add spaces where you want line-breaks to appear, then click on this icon.
Note: If you are using UniView on an iPad in portrait mode, this control is not available.
Counts the number of codepoints in the text area.
Converts all the characters in the text area to space-separated hexadecimal values. 
Does the inverse: it converts a set of space-separated hex codes to characters. In fact, it can also accept a range of escapes as input, and they don't need to be space-separated.
Look up the Han characters in the text area in the UniHan database. (Opens a page in a separate window.)
If you have more than one code point or character in the box, UniView will open a separate window containing Unihan information for each. If you try to open more than 5 windows, a warning will pop up.
You can also find a link to the Unihan database in the character details panel when a CJK Unified Ideograph is displayed there.
Converts any character escapes in the text area to ordinary characters.
This is particularly useful if you drag and drop a hex code point value from the Character details panel (such as that of a decomposition, or uppercase value). Clicking on this icon will convert the numbers to the character they represent.
Opens a page in a separate window that converts characters in the text area to various escape or other forms.
(You can also look up a single character at a time from the Character details panel by clicking on the Conversion tool link.)
Displays the characters in the text area as a list in the lower right part of the page with all relevant characters converted to uppercase, lowercase and titlecase. Characters that had no case conversion information are also listed.
Produces the same kind of output as clicking on the icon just above, but shows the mappings for those characters that have been changed, eg. e→E.
or 
Converts the text in the text area to Unicode Normalization Form C or D (NFC or NFD). The change may not be obvious, but if you click on you should see any changes to the text.
Clears all text from the text area.
The character list panel is where you will see tables and lists of characters that you generate from elsewhere in UniView.
When characters are displayed in table format and you hover over a character in this area you will see the code point and name appear at the top of the panel.
Whether in table or list format, if you click on a character one of two things will happen. Either details for that character will appear to the right, or the character will be added to the text area. The former is the default, but the latter will happen if you click on the icon described just below.
Unassigned character positions in a table are shown with a greyed out background (though you can change the colour, if you want).
Click on the above icons to determine what happens when you click on a character in a table.
If the first is showing, the character will be added to the text area. (You can also add characters to the text area, regardless of the settings of these icons, by double-clicking on them.)
If the second is showing, character data will be displayed in the character detail panel, to the right.
For each block or range of characters, these links allow you to quickly highlight characters with the property letter, mark, number, punctuation, or symbol. For more fine-grained property distinctions, see the Filter panel.
In addition, there are links for each of the subdivisions in the Unicode charts. Note that the subdivisions are listed in the order they appear in the charts, so in some cases there are more than one link with the same name. This is the case in Bengali, as you can see above, for the subdivisions called 'Various signs'.
(Since the highlight function is used for this, don't forget that, if you happen to highlight a useful subset of characters and want to work with just those, you can use the Make list from highlights command, or click on the 
icon to move those characters into the text area.)
This panel shows detailed information and links for a single character.
The previous and next clickable text at the top allows you to step through characters in the block one by one. It skips code values that don't have assignments, and at the end of a block it will move you to the first character of the following block, and vice versa.
Han and hangul characters you will see a link View in PDF code charts (pageXX). For Han blocks, this will open the PDF file for the block. The PDF is useful if there is no picture or font glyph for that character, but also allows you to see the variant forms of the character. Get more information.
The notes panel appears only when a check mark appears alongside Show notes in the Lookup panel. It also only appears if notes actually exist for character being displayed in the Character details panel.
The notes provide information I have gathered while learning about scripts, and should not be considered authoritative. Notes may change and new notes will be added from time to time.
If a note is displayed, you'll also find a link at the bottom of the Character details panel that allows you to open the full page from which the notes were taken. These pages carry annotations for a whole Unicode block or set of blocks.
Click on the area you need help with:
This control allows you to search for characters with a particular property. It creates a list of matching characters.
By default, searches match against the characters in a list or table in the Character list panel. Matching characters will be highlighted. (You can then produce a list of just the highlighted characters by clicking on the icon next to Filter > Make list from highlights. If you need to refine your search, you could then search again on this list, and so on.)
To enlarge the search to the whole of Unicode, deselect the check box labelled Show properties only for the items listed below.
If you have highlighted items in a list, using the Find or Show properties controls, this control will remove all but the highlighted items from the list.
If you have highlighted items in a list in the lower left panel, using the Find or Show properties controls, this control will remove all the highlighted items from the list, leaving the non-highlighted items only.
This control allows you to see when a character was added to Unicode. It shows version numbers for characters added after Unicode version 1.1.
You can also find the same information on a character-by-character basis in the Character detail panel for that character.
To remove the information, click on the icon alongside, or display new data in the left panel.
Click on the area you need help with:
If this is checked, hex code point numbers in lists in lists will be preceded by U+. The default is just the number.
This allows you to change the order and items in lists appearing in the lower left panel. By default, you would see something like this:
0968 २ DEVANAGARI DIGIT TWO
With this control you can position the character before or after the number (or both!) or remove it altogether. You can also specify whether the list should show the number and/or the name of the character.
This control is provided for people who want some control over how the list will look when copied and pasted into their text.
This allows you to hide the column and row numbers around a table. The default is to show the numbers.
These controls allows you to change the height of the display box in the lower left panel. Just enter the height you want in pixels (just the number) or select a preset size.
This is particularly useful when you are dealing with lists on a small screen such as a netbook. If you set the height to something like 400px, you can scroll through a long list, but still see the details in the right panel when you click on a character in the list.
This control allows you to increase the size of the characters in the lower left panel (independently of text elsewhere on the page). Note: It has no effect when viewing characters as graphics.
To see all text larger, use the normal browser method for zooming (eg. Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- in browsers on Windows).
The way to make a single character in a matrix or list appear in the text area is to double-click on it.
To copy all characters in the list or table into the text area, click on the icon, which can be found just below the text area.
On the Filter tab, click on next to Make list from highlights. The characters shown in the lower left panel will be reduced to a list of just those that were highlighted. (This is particularly useful for refining searches.)
On the Filter tab, click on next to Make list from non-highlighted items. The characters shown in the lower left panel will be reduced to a list of just those that were not highlighted. (This is particularly useful for refining searches.)
Mouse over a character and the decimal code point value pops up in a tooltip. The decimal code point value is also shown in the right panel.
If mouseover doesn't work (for example on a mobile phone), display the details for the character and you will see the decimal code point listed.
This can be particularly useful when you want to copy and paste a list into another document. In the options, use the check boxes after List format to indicate what you want to see.
Toggle the check box labelled Show U+ in lists on the Options tab.
Information about Han characters will have a link View data in Unihan database. As expected, this opens a new window at the page of the Unihan database corresponding to this character.
Han and hangul characters also have a link View in PDF code charts (pageXX). For Han blocks, this will open the PDF file for that block at the page that lists this character on Firefox and Chrome. (For Safari and Edge you will need to scroll to the page indicated.) The PDF is useful if there is no picture or font glyph for that character, but also allows you to see the variant forms of the character.
For some Han blocks, the number of characters per page in the PDF file varies slightly. In this case you will see the text approx; you may have to look at a page adjacent to the one you are taken to for these characters.
Note that some of the PDF files are quite large. If the file size exceeds 3Mb, a warning is included.
The following options are available from the Character details panel.
Click on the CLDR's Property demo link. A new window will open to show the entry for that character in the CLDR database. This provides additional, less commonly used data and properties relating to the character.
Click on the decodeUnicode link. A new window will open to show the entry for that character in the decodeUnicode database. decodeUnicode is a wiki where people can provide information about characters.
decodeUnicode.org is a wiki where people can contribute information about Show blocks and characters. It is developed at the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and has the objectives of creating a basis for fundamental typographic research and facilitating a textual approach to the characters of the world for all computer users. (They also provide the graphic versions of characters for UniView.)
Click on the FileFormat link. A new window will open to show the entry for that character in the FileFormat database.
The FileFormat pages provide useful information for Java and .Net programmers.
Click on the Conversion tool link. A new window will open to show a number of possible alternative representations of the character, eg. numeric character entity references, percent escaped forms, hex and decimal code point information, etc.
Click on the link next to the subheading Show block in the Character details panel and all characters in that block will be displayed as a list or table (according to your settings).
This is useful for pointing people to particular information using a URL, for example in email. By providing query parameters in the URI you can start up UniView with specific information displayed as follows:
You should only use one of these query parameters in a single call to UniView.
François Yergeau co-developed the Unicode Code Converter utility, and translated it into French.
Patrick Andries translated UniView into French, but that was many versions ago, and the French version is no longer available.