BabelMapThis free Unicode character map is far more powerful than the standard Windows character map. It supports the latest version of Unicode, currently Unicode 5.1.0 (released 2008-04-04). If you work extensively with
special characters I recommend it. The main dialogue (below) has buttons on the right to scroll quickly through Unicode blocks, or you can select the Unicode Block from the drop down list. Right-click on any character to zoom in and view it on a popup. Select the font from the Single Font drop down list, or view all characters available across multiple fonts by using a composite font. The font size used by the Edit Buffer can also be set. Use the search fields to find a character by name (or part of a name), or by its Unicode
code-point (hexadecimal or decimal). Copy characters to the edit buffer with double-click. The edit buffer can show characters,
hex codes, decimal codes, or Unicode Character Numbers, and whichever is currently viewed can be copied to the Windows clipboard for pasting into other applications. The edit buffer can thus be used to convert text to codes, and vice versa. From the menus at the top of the dialogue you can access many advanced features to
analyse fonts in detail. For example, you can use colour coding to filter characters in various ways. Below, the characters are colour coded by Unicode version, showing how different characters were gradually added to the Unicode standard. The Font Analysis utility (F7) will show which Unicode blocks are contained in a font, or find which fonts on your system cover different Unicode blocks. The Font Information dialogue will reveal details about the current font such as naming, description, license agreement, designer links, and supported platforms. The help file is not included with the download, and has not been updated to my knowledge. You can download the old help file for version 1.8, which will tell you most of
what you need to know, and quite a lot that you probably don’t. |