unicode
i made video called “unicode”. it shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 – 65536 (49571 characters). one character per frame.
i was starting with adobe after effects but in the end used a custom written program that just filed out png-images. i then had ffmpeg assemble them together to the 33 minutes of video.
the hardest part (or so i thought) was how to find out which character were displayable by the computer and which were shown as nasty “undefined character”-boxes. i was trying to find a programmatic way but solved it in the end with a text editor. i just edited the text file containing all characters in the range and deleted all undefined characters. it took me half an hour instead of hours of writing a new program that could detect those nasty boxes.
because i received so many questions about the sound i will write a few words: the sound is me reciting the alphabet (in german). one letter per frame. in the beginning though it’s one letter every two frames with the start of the chinese section it’s then one per frame. i added quite a bit of randomization to make it more interesting and gradually increased the length of the played sounds until the middle and then reduced it again. also a little bit of filtering. one interesting thing is that the alphabet has 26 characters but the video framerate is 25 frames per second so it gradually shifts. but you won’t notice because of the radomization.
here’s the list of displayble characters for Helvetica on a mac (it won’t display in the blog posting as the blog doesn’t seem to be unicode-aware, so no arab, chinese, japanese posts here?):
it might look different in your browser though but most of the characters should work.
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46 Responses to “unicode”.
Half an hour’s a long time but it kept me surprisingly entertained for a good six minutes.
That’s a conceptually simple but also strong and uncluttered language piece, Joerg.
It’s interesting to watch as an overview of Unicode and the languages of the world–as well as a good deal of whatever else is included in contemporary notions of language and code. Unicode gives us a sense of how the notion of language has expanded to encompass not only the multi-lingual but also code, in various ways. A cast of thousands. Bar and Yeace.
I haven’t studied Unicode. Does it describe 65537 distinct characters? How many distinct characters? Are some of them really “undefined” or is that a matter of having a proper Unicode font installed? Are there proper Unicode fonts?
Could you also say something about the audio?
Love it. How did you generate the audio? Is it speaking the character names quickly?
This is extremely cool. How is the sound generated?
Awesome! How did you generate the sounds? They feel perfect…
I was hoping somebody would do this. I just started a similar project at http://codepoint.tumblr.com, highlighting an interesting code point each day. Finding displayable characters has been challenging, but I’ll use your list from now on.
What is the audio in the video?
What a terrible waste of YouTube space! You could have written a tiny JavaScript program that does the same.
Although it is impressing that it takes half an hour to show all those characters.
How was the audio created? I sounds like the pitch goes up as the unicode character sequence goes up. Is it tied to the characters in any meaningful way?
I only watched 2 minutes it, but I feel it could use some music.
What is the sound? Very excellent.
I like it! Interesting work
Every webpage should include “encoding” statement in its header, specifying UTF8 or something else, but few do.
What did you do for the sound?
Fascinating. Makes me want to be really, really smart so I can use more of the unicode character set. (What does it all mean?)
I am only 5 minutes in, however, and I AM SURE there are some character repeats in there…or is that the idea? This high art…especially high net poetics…can leave me unsure of myself…
How was the audio generated? Is it synthesized speech of some kind?
Stunning presentation. Curious how you decided upon the sound. Seems to be variation in pitch and volume. I didn’t like it at first, but then it really felt just right. Any additional thoughts there?
Nice. I’d like to see an accessible version, with closed captioning and with descriptive video for the visually impaired.
Nice work! How did you do the sounds? Are they arbitrary or do they represent the character displayed?
Appreciate your love for the fundamentals bytes.
[...] just released a new piece, a video called Unicode. It’s a 33:17 long, and simply displays Unicode characters. Each character is displayed for [...]
What’s the soundtrack?
i did this on a mac and so i was depending on the unicode capabilities of OSX. the principal font is Helvetica which provides around 2300 glyphs but osx chains them together with other fonts and font variants so when you enter a character that is not included in the original font it can still be displayed. but actually the unicode standard defines much more than 65536 characters but i was not able to display them. and even in the first 0xffff characters there are some gaps. that’s why there are only 49500 chars in the video.
i’ll update the post above with some words about the sound.
no the characters don’t repeat. it’s just that in the unicode standard that there are some double glyphs but usually they are slightly different. watch it again
great project!
It’s nice as you attached the txt file also.
Yes! all are not viewable.
Crazy experiment!
Just awsome! The letters and marks really created new iamges while changing and moving…
[...] more info (on the sound, for instance), visit here. « Weird Bridges: Google Earth Glitches LikeBe the first to like this [...]
Great project and execution! The video is pretty amazing.
One idea I have come up with… maybe you could figure out how to generate transition images between each character, so instead of a flashing you get a smooth transformation. Let me know if you try that out!
The U+FFFF limit has long been broken. Unicode goes up to U+10FFFF. Will there be a sequel to this movie?
What I like about it is how quickly and effectively it got me thinking about the forms….
I always want to “read” letters, but very quickly I found myself estranged from reading, and looking at them for a different reason. Wondering where they would go, seeking visual metaphor rather than a rhetorical one.
Nice!
This makes me very proud indeed.
cool, i think i’ll have to extend it to feature film length…
i am already thinking of extending it but i am not sure if osx can display the range above 0xffff.
would be nice but then the film would have to be much longer or have a faster frame rate.
I watched this video on NZT and now I can read the whole internet without Google Translate!
It should have a running index as well.
Now we’re left wondering ‘Which letter is this?’ and ‘How to type it?’
can I get this in 3D!
[...] Unicode Video I just came across this video on YouTube showing every displayable (with some restrictions) character in the Unicode BMP. (1 character per [...]
heya,
nice video, congrats!
6 months ago I did a similar sampler with pure html/css/js, and some other fun variations for an online unicode art gallery
http://www.?šž.si
http://www.?šž.si/sampler.html
best, b
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode has images (SVG and PNG) of every Unicode character, so you could use that instead of rendering them yourself. Solves all the font issues for you automatically.
Great video, though! Any chance of a GIF or animated PNG of this? Seems like it would make a great avatar on a forum. 40 or 50 MB, though, so a bit too large.
Be nice to have as a tattoo on tour forehead if they had animated tattoos. Do they?
@bstefans:
yes, but this one would be very expensive since its so long
Joerg: of course the Mac handles all of Unicode, even beyond the Base Multilingual Plane. The Character Viewer (see System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, check Keyboard & Character Viewer, then display it from the keyboard menu) will let you see the entire set, if you switch it into View: Code Tables mode.
Jim Andrews: there are references at unicode.org (or on Wikipedia) to find out about the history, scope and size of Unicode.
@justin true, but a lot of the unicode ranges after 0xffff are empty
[...] alldisplayablechars it might look different in your browser though but most of the characters should work. here’s the list of displayble characters for Helvetica on a mac (it won’t display in the blog posting as the blog doesn’t seem to be unicode-aware, so no arab, chinese, japanese posts here?): unicode [...]