X-Fonter 14.0

Character Search

The Character Search tab is the fifth tab of the Font Detail Panel. It lets you locate any Unicode character without having to browse through the Unicode Character Map manually. You can search by the character's official name, its numeric code point, or by typing or pasting the character itself — and you can combine search modes to run more targeted queries.

Results are always displayed in the currently selected font and in the foreground and background colours set in the Control Panel, so you can immediately see whether the font you are evaluating actually renders each matching character.

The Three Search Modes

Three checkboxes at the top of the tab select which search mode to use: Name, Number, and Character. You can tick more than one at a time to run a combined search across multiple modes simultaneously.

Mode	What you enter	What is returned
Name	A word or phrase from the character's official Unicode name, or a regular expression pattern	All characters whose Unicode name contains the search term
Number	A decimal or hexadecimal code point value	The single character at that code point
Character	One or more characters typed or pasted directly into the search box	Each individual character in the input, with its name and code point

Search by Name

Name search looks up characters by their official Unicode name — the same names shown in the statusbar of the ASCII and Unicode character maps. The search is case-insensitive and uses regular expressions, which makes it considerably more powerful than a simple text match.

For example, entering Euro|Dollar returns all characters whose name contains either "Euro" or "Dollar" — the pipe character | acts as an OR operator in regular expression syntax.

Character Search results for the name query Euro|Dollar, showing five matching characters including the Euro sign and Dollar sign variants, each rendered in the current font — Name search for `Euro|Dollar` returns five characters. The first column renders each result in the currently selected font.

Some other useful name search patterns:

arrow — finds all arrow symbols (left arrow, right arrow, double arrow, and so on)
^latin small letter — finds all lowercase Latin letters (the ^ anchors the match to the start of the name)
copyright|trademark|registered — finds the ©, ™ and ® symbols in one search
fraction — finds all Unicode fraction characters (½, ⅓, ¼, and others)

Tip: If you do not know the exact Unicode name of a character, start with a broad descriptive word — for example bullet, dash, or star — and narrow down from the results. The official Unicode names are always in English and use plain descriptive vocabulary, so natural language guesses usually get close.

Search by Number

Number search finds the single character at a specific Unicode code point. Enter the code point as a decimal integer or as a hexadecimal value prefixed with 0x or U+.

Examples:

Entering 69 returns E (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E, U+0045)
Entering 8364 returns € (EURO SIGN, U+20AC)
Entering 0x20AC or U+20AC also returns the Euro sign — all three formats are accepted

Tip: The decimal and hexadecimal values for any character you have already spotted in the character maps are shown in the statusbar at the bottom of the screen. Copy the hex value from there and paste it directly into the Number search box to jump straight to that character.

Search by Character

Character search works in the opposite direction to Name search: instead of entering a name to find a character, you enter the character itself to find its name and code point. This is useful when you have copied an unknown symbol from a document and want to identify it, or when you want to quickly look up the code points for a set of characters you already have.

Entering Euro as a character search — not a name search — returns four results: the individual characters E, u, r and o, each shown with its own Unicode name and code point.

Character Search results for the character query Euro, showing four rows — one each for E, u, r and o — with their Unicode names and code points — Character search for the text "Euro" returns one row per input character, each with its Unicode name and code point.

Tip: Paste a string of mixed symbols directly into the Character search box to identify all of them at once. Each character in the input produces one row in the results, regardless of whether the characters come from different Unicode blocks.

The Results List

Each row in the results list shows:

Glyph — the character rendered in the currently selected font at the current preview size. If the font does not support the character, a fallback box is shown instead, making it immediately clear which results the font cannot render.
Code point — the Unicode code point in hexadecimal (for example, U+20AC)
Decimal value — the same code point in base 10
Character name — the official Unicode name

Click any row to select it. The selected character is also highlighted in the Unicode Character Map tab, so you can switch there to see the character in context within its Unicode block.

Double-click a row to add the character to the Sample edit box, from where you can copy it to the clipboard with Ctrl+C and paste it into any application.

Combining Search Modes

Ticking more than one checkbox runs all selected modes against the same search term simultaneously and merges the results into a single list. For example, ticking both Name and Number and entering 169 would return both the character at code point 169 (©, COPYRIGHT SIGN) and any characters whose name contains the string "169" — in practice, a useful way to cross-check results when you are uncertain which mode applies.