I usually use this tool http://leftlogic.com/projects/entity-lookup/ when I need to look for special unicode character. You type your query like "arrow" and you get a display of what looks like an arrow. Really handy.

Something like Detexify seems like it would be more useful, as I often know the shape of what I'm looking for, but possibly not the name.

Nice.

I wonder, what's with the parenthesized stuff in "Circled"? Why do the Unicode people think we need individual characters representing "(1)", "1." "(a)", etc.?

By the way, there is a little bug somewhere. I somehow got it into a mode where it would not show me the characters starting at #100. If I clicked ASCII (to get #0) and moved the X100 slider one step to the right, then I got #9100. But sometimes it works.

The "universal" in unicode went from meaning "you can represent any modern language in it" to "you can translate any encoding in it without loss of information AND any character you could possibily want to have in a font will have it's codepoint".

And so now you have precomposed accented characters and combining diacriticals, presentation forms for arabic characters, precomposed ligatures, double width latin characters (that look better with CJK characters), icons for chess pieces, emoticons and control characters (including several different spaces and newline characters).

Actually supporting all of unicode is a massive undertaking, and if you start using lesser known features of unicode you will find plenty of bugs everywhere.

Re: the circled numbers; They're all the same width. (1) is the same width as (20).

I like it.

The sliders at the top are a bit of an odd choice though. And they are not actually times-a-power-of-10, but in fact plus-a-power-of-ten.

This is very helpful. I would suggest two improvments:

1) If you move a slider bar, it resets the lower-valued slider bars. I don't know if this is intended behavior, but to get to the 8100's, I moved the hundred's bar, then the thousands. But this sequence reset the hundreds to 0, which required me to re-move the hundreds slider bar.

2) Is there a way to have the symbols in each cell as images? Because if I don't have a font install with a particular symbol, those cells display the dreaded empty rectangle.

That looks like it could be useful, but it has two flaws. One is that you can't copy and paste the escape sequences and the other is that it's difficult to find, say, the Russian alphabet if you don't know its numeric range.

Awesome. I use Unicode symbols as a shortcut/prototype for icons. I always look them up in wikipedia, which is painful. This makes my life easier. Thank you!