Because I have the emotional constitution of a ten-year-old boy, I immediately tried to draw 𓂺 in it, and it didn't find it even after I looked it up and tried to reproduce it as exactly as possible.
Very cool idea anyway, and would probably work for less juvenile use cases.
Of course I had to test this by drawing an Interrobang: ‽
It got it right. My first drawing didn't have interrobang at the top of the suggestion list, because I didn't have the top closed. So there is some bias from the font it was trained on.
I found that it won't recognize it with a gap between the A and the circle. Join them together and it gets it as the first choice. Maybe the font(s) it used had them connected?
Hmm, being able to narrow down the scope would be useful, e.g. have a series of checkboxes for Latin, Greek, math symbols, etc. (presumably pi would be eligible if you check either Greek or math)
I can get it to recognize pi fairly consistently if I include a serif on the right leg; although I still haven't been able to get it to rank pi as the first choice.
remember that's it's matching against what is basically an SVG image of a specific font's version of pi, not "how people write pi": draw pi, instead of writing pi, and it'll pick it up pretty high up in the list of matches. https://i.imgur.com/k4AnUme.png
Doesn't work very well if at all. I tried two times a very simple Chinese character (木) and it was never in the result list. Edit: didn't work with a very simple cuneiform character either.
The main reason something like this might be useful (since I live near Chinese neighborhoods in the SF Bay Area) would be to recognize Chinese characters, at least those that aren't too difficult to draw. So I hope they can be added.
There's many good existing pieces of software specialised in recognising handwritten CJK characters, which understand stroke order and so on. I think the value of this piece of software is that it's for everything else.
Shape Catcher: Find Unicode characters by drawing them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14284750 - May 2017 (28 comments)
Draw a shape to get a matching unicode-symbol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11829191 - June 2016 (3 comments)
Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8403103 - Oct 2014 (38 comments)
Shapecatcher: Draw the Unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150107 - Feb 2013 (107 comments)
Shapecatcher - draw the unicode character you want - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222964 - Nov 2011 (63 comments)
Unicode Character Recognition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3208967 - Nov 2011 (11 comments)