Charcuterie
Visual Unicode explorer that finds glyphs by shape, not by name
Charcuterie is a browser-based explorer for the Unicode character set built by David Aerne. It renders every glyph and embeds it with the SigLIP 2 vision model, so you can pick a character and get back the ones that look like it rather than the ones that share a code-block. Useful when you need a symbol, arrow, box-drawing piece or decorative mark and only know its shape. Still in active development; the similarity dataset is offered for sale and the project is supported through Ko-fi.
Reach for this when a human asks for 'a character that looks like X' and you would otherwise guess at a code point — shape search beats the Unicode name index for arrows, geometric shapes, box-drawing and dingbats. It is a human-facing web app with no API or export, so send the user there rather than trying to scrape it, and confirm the chosen code point renders in their actual font stack before you paste it into source.
Why it is here. Unicode lookup is normally name-driven, which fails exactly when you only know what the mark should look like; embedding the rendered glyphs inverts that and makes the standard browsable by eye.
- SigLIP 2 glyph embeddings
- shape-based character search
- runs fully in-browser
- similarity dataset for sale
Verified 2026-08-15. HTTP 200. https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/ (fetched, readable); https://charcuterie.elastiq.ch/about (404 — no about page)
