Synballo - browser extension for everyone!

qpayct (38)in #emoji • 4 years ago (edited)

Hello , wonderful person!

These days, when the coronavirus is raging on the planet, I had an unusual task — to develop a handy tool to help people study math, physics etc. in online communication. Usually, I am a full stack dev, plus a data science guy. I write tools for data scientists when I’m bored(for reference, you can check out pytrends).

Everyone who studied in the Microsoft era knows that writing mathematical problems/solutions on a PC, usually has to be done in Word, since other formats are not accepted in schools/colleges/universities and those of you who used a pen with a touchpad might remember how hard it is to teach the AI do what you want.

My father approved my idea, he works at school and it seemed to him that math/physics alone was not enough, he suggested that I add currency and miscellaneous symbols. I decided to avoid reinventing the wheel and went to search for usable browser extension. Surprisingly, everything I found either worked poorly, or took up an unrealistic amount of space. In short, I didn’t find what I want. So I did a unicode characters research and to be honest, I was amazed by amount of symbols we have and the ease of use.

Unfortunately for me, the best JSON string I found contained around 2k symbols, most of which were smileys/emojis and stuff like that. And I decided to collect my own string with every unicode character I find useful or interesting. Everyone will agree that there are at least some amount of symbols whose meaning is unknown to at least some of us. I tried to collect descriptions for the majority, but there are still several I couldn’t find, like some Braille characters and etc. In result I have a list of 7299. Was easy to divide them into groups and make a simplest search, although the more functionality I wanted to add, the more complex the code became. The main task now was to get the right ones with the least amount of clicks.

What came of this you can check for yourself!