Show HN: One clean, developer-focused page for every Unicode symbol

[yarlinghe]

I’m building a Unicode reference where each symbol has its own dev-friendly page with all relevant encodings.

Example: [https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to](https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/almost-equal-to)

Includes Unicode, HTML, CSS, JS, UTF-8/16 bytes, URL encoding, and usage examples.

The same structure is used across thousands of symbols (math, arrows, currency, tech/UI, punctuation).

Built because existing references are fragmented. Feedback welcome.

[Fileformat]

I run a couple similar sites:

FileFormat.Info[1] has a page per codepoint. It has been around awhile, so the UI isn't as whizzy, but it has all the data and works w/o JavaScript

UnicodeSearch[2] is an updated search UI that uses JavaScript and the excellent Tabulator grid widget.

There are actually a ton of similar sites with a page-per-codepoint. It is all fun to make one, until the bots come along and hammer every page.

[1] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2248/index.htm

[2] https://www.unicodesearch.org/

[darrenf]

Long time fileformat.info user. here, just wanted to say thanks -- always found it incredibly useful for this exact purpose.

[catoc]

1. Enthusiastically try fileformat.info

2. “141 TCF vendor(s) and 69 ad partner(s) want to track you”

3. Exit :-(

[typeofhuman]

No disrespect but I would not call this "clean". The design is overwhelmingly cluttered and distracting. Especially given that each symbol is obscured by a black square with an arrow covering it. The symbols are themselves very small.

Maybe get rid of all the noise and just display the symbols in a nice grid without all the fluff or layers.

[lejalv]

It feels really noisy and specifically, not clean for me too, so much that it pushes me away. It's interesting and fortunate that it works for the author and some (most?) commentators.

[hnlmorg]

I agree. Unicode references sites are numerous and yet this is one of the worst I’ve used in terms of distracting visual noise.

[wdporter]

I find this page the cleanest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters. I can usually just do a Ctrl-F and find what I want.

[merelysounds]

Feature request: some context, history and/or example of popular usage.

Some symbols leave me with more questions than answers, like “LEFT HALF RUNNING MAN”[1].

I’d like to at least see that it’s a glyph part, that there are two in total, and what does the other half look like; right now the “right half running man” is not listed anywhere on that page, not even in the “related symbols” section.

Off topic, the running man symbol possibly comes from MouseText character set (the one in the Apple IIc[2]). It was one of many character sets included in the legacy computing block[3].

[1]: https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/left-half-running-man

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MouseText

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_for_Legacy_Computing

[jon_richards]

This history was a surprisingly interesting read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43667010

[yarlinghe]

Great example — thanks for the context. I added explicit linking for paired glyph parts (left/right halves) and reference links in Notes. This kind of symbol history is exactly the gap I want to fill.

[WA]

Nice, but way too many abbreviated descriptions and no way to see the full name of a symbol without clicking on it. Needs a tooltip / title.

Or better, if 90% of all symbol names are abbreviated, your design simply doesn't work. This is especially apparent in the "arrows" section.

[yarlinghe]

You’re right.

The abbreviations (arrows in particular) made scanning worse than it should be. I’ve pushed a quick update: full names on hover/focus, plus a Compact / Readable toggle for the grid.

Thanks for the nudge.

[yarlinghe]

24h update after the Show HN — quick recap.

Based on the feedback here, I spent the last day tightening a few core things:

- Navigation / mobile: tapping a card now opens the symbol page directly; copy is a separate, larger button. The tiny expand target is gone.

- Search: alias + lightweight fuzzy matching is in (e.g. “section”, “angstrom”, “greater than”), plus a /codepoint/... fallback so pasting a literal character or U+XXXX always lands on a usable page, even outside the curated index.

- Missing glyphs: added a small “Font tips (if you see □)” section with system font notes and Noto suggestions.

- Content: HTML/CSS/JS guidance now recommends writing the literal character + UTF-8 by default; entities/codes are framed as legacy/reference only. Added Notes and improved Related (pairs, confusables, same block).

- Privacy: removed session recording; analytics are opt-in with a real reject-all (everything works fine with tracking off).

Direction going forward: fewer generic “how-to” instructions, more symbol-specific context — confusables, paired glyphs, rendering quirks, and references people actually look for.

Thanks again for the detailed feedback — it materially improved the project.

[jdeisenberg]

I’m looking at the currency block. Each box has a colored “drop shadow”. I spent a minute or so trying to figure out what the significance of the color is. Finally, I noticed that the color appears to cycle between cyan, magenta, and yellow. Is this a design element only, or do the colors actually have some meaning with respect to the symbol?

[yarlinghe]

Purely cosmetic. In hindsight, probably unnecessary — but once you add color, it’s hard to stop

[spoiler]

Not the author, but it seems to be only stylistic

[stack_framer]

It doesn't fit my definition of "clean" at all, but that's a subjective word anyway. I do have some feedback (unrelated to being clean):

- The search field is arguably the most important element on the site. It might benefit from a magnifying glass icon and/or some visual distinctions that make it actually look like a text input for searching. It's thick border and shadow make it look like all the other boxes on the page that have thick borders and shadows!

- Speaking of the search field, it would be really nice if it supported fuzzy search. For example, I searched for "greater than" and got no results. I had to search for "greater-than" (with a dash) to find the math symbols (like ≥).

- The small font size of the symbols makes them really hard to see for old people like me who are pretending not to be old.

- Ditch the analytics and cookie consent nonsense. These are anti-developer!

[savolai]

+1 The small font size combined with the big black box with green arrow that, at least on my iphone xs, covers part of the symbol itself, makes it really hard to see the symbols themselves on front page.

[yarlinghe]

Planning to add more symbol-specific notes (confusables, common pitfalls, rendering quirks). Curious what details people usually look for but can’t find.

[__patchbit__]

I don't know how to find the ideal font for the missing glyph on my environment which is BSD.

Using the `unicode' command from plan9userspace, for example

   unicode 2ff0-2fff

the last three symbols are shown inside emacs as squares with the four hex values inside.

Typing in the search field `2fff' finds `no match found'.

[layer8]

The useful info that doesn’t already exist a dozen times on the web is the info you can’t auto-generate.

[california-og]

My go-to site for Unicode symbols is graphemica.com. I like that you show very directly the different use cases, but miss different encodings and the ability to browse unicode sequentially.

[jeffhwang]

+1 graphemica has the right mix of completeness and simplicity for my tastes.

[toss1]

Very cool and helpful - I'll be using this a lot!

Interesting I discovered two new-to-me temperature symbols (℃ and ℉), but couldn't find the Alt-0176 ° generic degree sign that shows up on the MS Character Map app. I also found the There Exists symbol ∃ !! I'd been seeking for years; it was so useful since finding out about it in college logic courses... This will be even more useful when the Alt-code fields are all filled in! Thanks!

[diziet]

Cool! Ideas: At least do an ensemble approach by queuering llms to explain what the symbols "are". It's so auto generated now. Link to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximation#Typography

Developers need to understand context too, not see a static page of "macOS: Use Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) and search by name, or copy/paste."

The related to symbols make little sense. For example: https://fontgenerator.design/symbol/acute-angle Does not link to all other "angle" pages, but does to Aktieselskab?

[yarlinghe]

Good point. I added a Notes section and reworked “Related” to focus on things people actually get confused by (pairs, confusables, same block), not just category adjacency.

[arendtio]

Some constructive criticism:

Please don't display text directly on the grid background image. It makes it impossible to read the text easily. Currently, this is the case when you open the page for a specific symbol in the 'Usage & Context' section.

[yarlinghe]

Noted.

Fixed.

[keepamovin]

This is beautiful. Love the design. When I read the title I thought it was "one page per Unicode" so I click on the codes and hope a page will open with a giant Unicode where I can see about it in details.

Oh well! Still good.

When I click the "Click to copy" my UI reflex tells me to look for a "Copied!" or similar acknowledgement. But I don't see one, so there's uncertainty if it was copied safely to my invisible clipboard or not.

Please keep making this, it's good! What inspired you for the design? I like this style, and notice it around, but can't pinpoint.

[phforms]

Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).

There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Very nice.

I found it odd, that tapping on a square “highlights” it, by making it “pop,” but nothing else really happens.

It took me a bit to figure out that I need to actually select the arrow in the upper right corner, to get the page.

[yarlinghe]

Agreed — the small expand target was a mistake, especially on mobile. I switched to “tap card = open details” and moved copy into a dedicated, larger button. Much clearer now.

[tantalor]

The arrow is too small to click on mobile

[amelius]

Could use a list of (free) fonts that support the corresponding glyph.

[yarlinghe]

Added a small “Font tips (if you see □)” section with system font notes and Noto suggestions. Also added a codepoint fallback page so you can still inspect encodings even when the glyph doesn’t render locally.

[layer8]

Also coverage by system fonts.

[vishnuharidas]

Sharing the UTF-8 Playground I built recently: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/

[thwarted]

It's odd that searching for "section" finds U+2E39 (Top Half Section Sign) but not U+00A7 (Section Sign).

The directions for input on on each operating system are all the same, use an app? On Windows there's a key sequence based on the codepoint integer. It should tell you exactly what to type. The Linux one is especially odd "Use the Character Map app or a Compose key sequence, then paste into your app" because if there's a compose key sequence you don't need to paste it.

[chrismorgan]

> Use an HTML entity, a decimal code, or a hex code.

Please no: just write the character. <, & and (in quoted attributes) " or ' are the only characters that need to be encoded; a few others have arguable benefit to being encoded (most notably NO-BREAK SPACE), but most Unicode characters should just be put in literally. The days when you couldn’t be confident of the file encoding are past: your HTML is being served as UTF-8 (or in the rare case it isn’t, you should fix that instead of avoiding non-ASCII in the source).

Same deal with CSS (" and \ are the only ones you need to escape) and JavaScript (" or ' or `, as appropriate).

URLs? Occasionally you may encounter a legacy system where you need to percent-encode it yourself (similarly around punycoding internationalised domain names), but you can almost always (and thus, in my opinion, should) just write it and leave anything that wants it to be ASCII to perform the percent-encoding itself.

Excel I can’t comment on, but I presume you can just write "≈" and UNICHAR should almost never be used.

[yarlinghe]

Yep — fully agree.

For modern HTML/CSS/JS, you should just write the character and serve UTF-8. The entities / codes are there purely as reference for legacy cases, debugging, or when you only have a code point and no rendered glyph — not as a recommendation for normal authoring.

[LordGrey]

I really like this. I appreciate the many "copy" buttons that make it easy to grab various font values once I find a character. Good job!

[yarlinghe]

Thanks — glad the copy buttons are useful. That was exactly the goal.

[abeyer]

You say "for every unicode symbol", which I guess is true if you search by code, but for anything that isn't in your curated set I'm unable to even find it if I paste the literal character or use the "official" name.

eg ℝ "Double-Struck Capital R" won't show up at all unless I search it as U+211D.

[yarlinghe]

You’re right — the main index is curated. I added a /codepoint/… fallback so pasting a literal character or U+XXXX always lands you on a dev-friendly encoding page, even outside the curated sets. I also clarified this in the UI copy.

[rsync]

Clean ?

- Gratuitous, unnecessary cookies (and accompanying cookie consent dialog)

- cloudflare insights built into the pages

- non-zero counter in ublock origin

That's before we even get to the page source which contains, among other things:

  "text\":\"First, ensure you're using a modern browser. If problems persist, try refreshing the page or clearing your browser cache. Some older devices may have limited font support.\"}}

"Clean" web pages don't need hints like this - they work without clearing browser cache or worrying about "older devices".

I haven't seen this on HN in a while so it is worth reposting:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[johnnyfived]

Not super against cookie tracking or consent especially for a free platform, but these extreme color contrasts don't even seem to have any obvious correlations. Is it done just for looks? That's a crazy decision for a font information site

[victrflow]

Ohh, this is great! I actually was looking for something like this the other day. Thanks for sharing and nice work!

[ornornor]

Very clean design, congrats!

I’d love to see a section describing the glyph’s usage (I usual have to check Wikipedia for that) and which compose key sequence to use to type it. For instance on Linux (maybe other OSes too?) you can type <compose key> + e + = and get the euro sign.

[BrouteMinou]

Why do I get a spinning "waiting" on every page? That doesn't seem "clean" to me... That's supposed to be raw HTML with a search.

It's cluttered with how to put your HTML character in your HTML, while being supposedly focused for devs...

All that doesn't make sense to me.

[mda]

On mobile, the expand icon covers 1/4 of each character so it is hard to see what they are

[StrangeSound]

Opposite problem for me. I'm finding it impossible to expand because the button is so small!

[yarlinghe]

Yeah, mobile is rougher than desktop right now. Thanks for flagging it.

[layer8]

The styling/design doesn’t work with dark-mode extensions like Noir.

[whalesalad]

Gotta pay homage to the OG: https://raquo.net/rsaquo/

[NooneAtAll3]

How do I search for egyptian hieroglyphs? searching for "egyptian" neither for "hieroglyph" works

searching directly for 𓁤 also doesn't work

[NooneAtAll3]

expanded button go over the side of the screen for me

pressing "V", which I'd assume meant "expand horizontal button queue into a vertical text list" instead collapses all descriptions and turns "v" into a hamburger button...

[varunkv]

This is some great tool for account holders who wants aesthetic styling. Wanted to know how you monetize this clean product?

[Freak_NL]

> We use cookies and similar technologies for analytics (Google Analytics) and session recording (Microsoft Clarity). Ads may be enabled in the future (Google AdSense). By continuing to use this site, you acknowledge this notice. You can manage cookies in your browser settings. EU/UK users: this serves as our cookie notice.

No. Please just give me an option to reject all tracking cookies instead of just kicking me in the face with a done deal.

Whoever wrote this 'EU/UK users: this serves as our cookie notice' is ignorant of the actual law. Have a look at:

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

[yarlinghe]

Fair point — you’re right to call this out. I’ve now removed Microsoft Clarity (no session recording/heatmaps), and GA4 is opt‑in with a real “Reject all” option (default off). This is already deployed.

[rswail]

I'd like the hint to display the hidden parts of each box when hovered.

I don't need to be told on each one to "Click to Copy".

But nice concept.

[yarlinghe]

Good points. The hover hint could definitely do more useful work, and the repeated “Click to Copy” is probably overexplaining. UI polish still very much in progress

[MassPikeMike]

See also the very comprehensive presentation at https://codepoints.net . For example https://codepoints.net/U+2248?lang=en

[NoSalt]

I know the colors are a little ... intense, but I love it!

[slashdave]

Huh. Why can't it find "Angstrom" (U+212B)?

[brisket_bronson]

Quite useful, but that's far from "clean".

[alexpadula]

Useful!