UTF-8 icons to help "see" source template items quickly in a list

[Ryan_N]

I can't promise I'll continue using this setup--it's sort of cheesy. For the time being though, I think it's nevertheless useful. The purpose of these icons, are to quickly identify spot source template formats in a list.

You can see these yourself by pressing Control+Command+Space Bar.

I can't figure out how to post a screenshot to this forum of same resolution I took it in, so here is a link to the concept being used in practice. And a low-resolution image to follow, below.

Warning: because these "icon-images" are part of the UTF-8 character set, they are treated just like any letter or number you would type on your keyboard. View them as text, in other words. This is problematic, potentially, if you upload a Reunion tree into Ancestry---unless you desire such icons to literally appear as they do in the pictures below, in the source detail view of your tree on Ancestry. (The workaround, if you use FTM as the "transfer agent," is to batch delete these using FTM's find-and-replace feature---but doing this for every tree update, would be a chore!)

scr 2021-09-09 at 3.33.29 PM.jpg

[Bob White]

Perhaps a little more explanation would be in order. What I'm seeing here is presumably a screenshot. How does that become part of a character set? Or am I missing whatever you are saying? Either way, more information would be helpful.

[bbousquet]

Perhaps a little more explanation would be in order. What I'm seeing here is presumably a screenshot. How does that become part of a character set? Or am I missing whatever you are saying? Either way, more information would be helpful.

The Unicode character set contains thousands of icons/emoticons/glyphs/etc. that can be used in any text you type. They may cause issues when exporting data but they can decoderate things like you source titles. It's an interesting use of those.

[Ryan_N]

Bob White the purpose of this post was to share a technique users might wish to try on their own. The idea here is to very quickly spot sources in a list by way of an icon. As Benoît points out, these icons are part of the Unicode v. UTF-8 character-set, which is what I meant when I referred to treating them like text. The attached screenshot is just the Add New Source pop-up window, but in there, you can see how UTF-8 "alphabetizes" things that are not letters. This can be highly useful, I argue, as a way to add yet another grouping utility to source templates. For now, I like this A LOT. But there is problem in that I don't want these to appear on a public tree (that pop-up list / screenshot is showing you the text, icons in all, that would transfer through GEDCOM's TITL tag).

Hope that helps. Cheers!