HTML5: Unicode Profiling Project

admin November 10, 2010

The Unicode Profiling Project was designed to gather statistics on unicode support across systems. The software checks each symbol in your systems Unicode catalog (65,535 glyphs) to see which are visible on your computer using <canvas> and Javascript.

The data generated from your computer will help profile the state of unicode support on the web. Your computers unicode support, remote address, user agent and processing time will be submitted to the server upon completion of the test — a statistic analysis of the data will be published — no specific information about your computer will be published.

The code behind this project is an extension of isFontSupported (font detection in <canvas>). As with isFontSupported, the code behind Unicode Profiling Project is released under CC0, free to use this code in creative ways in your own projects ?

Running the test:

Once the test is initiated you’ll be able to watch the glyphs as they’re scanned with their related unicode block name. It typically takes over a minute to scan an entire collection of unicode characters. This is what the acid test looks like while being processed:

Reading your profile:

Once the processing has completed you will be presented with a string of binary representing what characters are visible, and which ones are unavailable or invisible (65,535 numbers). Here are the results from my Chromium browser running on OSX 10.6.4:

Unicode characters:

Now the fun part, click on “Show Available” — this may take a few seconds as you’re referencing tens of thousands of unicode characters at once:

Unicode #65018

Brail Patterns [0x2800-28FF]

Supported Browsers:

The project fully supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some false positives are produced in Internet Explorer as there is a unique “missing symbol” for every unicode block.

Results on my Mac:

Safari
49,493 visible glyphs
Firefox 3.6
49,428 visible glyphs
NOTE: Each undefined symbol has a unique hash unless text size is <=11
Google Chrome 7.0
49,493 visible glyphs
Chromium 8.0
49,492 visible glyphs
Opera 10.6
47,672 visible glyphs
NOTE: Supports different fonts in <canvas> than regular DOM

Results on my Windows:

IE 9.0
50,826 visible glyphs
NOTE: Some false positives… each range has it’s own undefined symbol.
Firefox 3.6
51,208 visible glyphs
NOTE: Each undefined symbol has a unique hash unless text size is <=10
Google Chrome 7.0
47,267 visible glyphs
NOTE: Textarea can have different unicode support than Div in some cases. For instance, on my computer ﰿ works in Textarea, but not in Div.
Opera 10.6
56,024 visible glyphs
NOTE: Supports different unicode in Canvas than Div and Textarea. Also, Opera supports more unicode characters than other browsers by far, possibly included in the package?

Further Research:
http://unicode.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/

Apps HTML5, Typography, Unicode

C.A.R.D.S. Project

admin October 19, 2015

I was recently asked to create artwork for the C.A.R.D.S. Project. Chris & John gave me no restrictions, and only one task: Create something interesting that fits on a 3.5 x 2.0 business card. For me, this was a dream project and an exciting excuse to play around with some generative algorithms!

My goal was to create an ‘ocean scene’. To do this I used Perlin noise vector fields, bezier curves, and color cycling. The ‘creatures’ or ‘waves’ are grown based on randomized parameters such as ‘width’, ‘length’ and ‘color’. The parameters change over time; some linearly, while others are mapped to cosine/sine waves and easing functions (this resulted in a more organic feeling).

I ended up submitting 250 unique cards to the project. Each card is composed of 10-frames and took 1-2 minutes to generate. Many were thrown out in the process! From there the cards were sent to GifPop for lenticular printing.

Here’s a few of my favorites (the squid in the first image is by Justin Windle):

Code Art Canvas, HTML5

Sketchpad 3.7

admin February 3, 2015

Sketchpad v3.7 has arrived!

Here’s a list of new features:

High-Res export for print! 300DPI
Autosaving to library!
Document resizing.
Path smoothing on Pencil tool—no more shaky lines!
Path tool – curved path editor.
Polyline tool – straight line editor.
Arrow brush with curved path (or straight path)
More background styles! Colors, gradients and patterns, oh my.
Outline style on Shapes, Text, and various supported Brushes.
Angle control on Linear Gradient style.
Color Noise on Linear & Radial Gradients
Designed for Mobile/Desktop hybrid experience.
Improved speed of undoing multiple actions.
Text-box resizing without scaling by holding ShiftKey.

Play around with the latest version to see for yourself ?

Apps HTML5, Sketchpad

Made with Code

admin June 23, 2014

I recently had the pleasure of working on Google’s Made with Code initiative with the Red & Co. creative studio and Mash a group of developers located in Portland Oregon.

My primary focuses were creating the renderer for the Bracelet Challenge along with the binary exporter that takes peoples rendered bracelets and sends them to Shapeways for 3D printing. I have to say this job was probably the most satisfying work that’s come my way! For three reasons: (1) The initiative of inspiring a more diverse range of people interested in programming at an early age is awesome (2) Red & Co and Mash were friendly, fun and altogether great team to work with (3) The work was challenging and allowed me time to work with more cutting edge technologies ?

The Bracelet renderer was developed with ThreeJS. My modest contribution back to the ThreeJS project can be found here: STLBinaryExporter

The letters were generated by Red & Co. and exported into STLs. Since STLs are huge uncompressed representations of 3D objects (made up of tons of triangles) the files from there were converted into CTMs using OpenCTM‘s ctmconv—this shaved 10’s of megabytes of the combined file-size of the entire alphabet. The letters were then mapped to a spiral like lego bricks as conceived by Ryan Reece of Mash. Here’s a screenshot of what that looked like:

The app also needed to run in Java (on Google’s AppEngine) so the server could render the bracelets the users created. Although the app could very well send the STL files directly to Shapeways, we needed to control what was being sent so there was no unfortunate surprises! By rendering on the backend we could be sure what was being sent to Shapeways. Instead of re-writing the code from scratch I decided to keep as much as possible in Javascript. I first got the scripts running in Rhino but it was too slow. I ran across the project Jav8 and was quite happy with the results performing around 10x faster than Rhino. I ended up writing some of the matrix math in Java and exposing the function to Javascript to speed things up further.

From there, the bracelets are sent to Shapeways where they are printed with high-quality nylon plastic on 3D printers from EOS, a German printer manufacturer who provided P760 SLS 3D printers to support the initiative.

The Bracelet challenge has a limited print run, so get them while you can! After that there will still be a lot of other fun challenges on the Made with Code website.

Here’s a video from Shapeways:

Apps HTML5, WebGL