Affinity Publisher: List of special characters

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

The invisible characters ‘Paragraph marks’, ‘Spaces’, and ‘Breaks’ can be displayed with the ‘Show Special Characters’ menu. These characters are then replaced by pseudo characters written in blue. I would like to make an equivalence table. Where can I find the list of these invisible characters and their blue pseudo-characters?

Thank you for your explanations.

[h_d]

You could use the Find and Replace dialog: 

[Pyanepsion]

😉Thanks h_d. However, that is not my question. I want to know the blue pseudo-characters.

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

I would like to make an equivalence table. Where can I find the list of these invisible characters and their blue pseudo-characters?

I don’t think there is a list within the app but the number of non-printable characters is quite small. Apart from space, tab, column break, frame break, line break, and paragraph break, what other such characters are there?

[h_d]

1 hour ago, Pyanepsion said:

I want to know the blue pseudo-characters.

Sorry, I didn't explain myself fully. If you choose (eg) Frame Break in the Find and Replace dialog, then the symbol that is displayed in the Find field corresponds to the pseudo-character in the text. It would certainly. be a bit laborious to go through each special character, but at least you would have a reference to their appearance, from which you could construct your table of equivalences :

There doesn't seem to be any way to search for Index Markers, though:

And there may be others that don't appear in the list above:

EDIT: from the Help, you can also identify the Unicode values of special characters in running text by placing the insertion point immediately after them and and choosing Text: Toggle Unicode 

 

But as @Alfred says, I don't think there's any single reference for all invisible characters.

 

 

Edited July 8, 2021 by h_d
Added info about Unicode

[carl123]

Some of these may match what Affinity uses...

 

[Pyanepsion]

Bravo Carl123.

Thanks to all. As mentioned above, the list is laborious to edit, we are not sure we have them all, and we don't necessarily know the Unicode code of the blue replacement character.

This list of matches exists, of course.

😀 Please a moderator to point it out here.

[Old Bruce]

@Pyanepsion Just so I am clear, are you needing a collection of printable glyphs, or images?

[Pyanepsion]

Hello, @Old Bruce.

I am looking for a complete list of replaced special characters and the Unicode numbers of the blue replacement characters. The idea is to make a correspondence table whose text can be reused within columns 1 and 2 the special characters and the Unicode code, and in columns 3 and 4 the replacement blue characters and the corresponding Unicode code, and 5 the blue characters.

Example, assuming that the blue character replacing space 0020 ( ) is the midpoint 00B7 (·).

Space  0020 Median point 00B7 ·
etc.

[walt.farrell]

53 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

Example, assuming that the blue character replacing space 0020 ( ) is the midpoint 00B7 (·).

Space  0020 Median point 00B7 ·

I'm curious what benefit that specific one would have, or actually the table in general.

You can't do anything with the 00B7 value. If you wanted, for example, to do a Find/Replace you've have to use a space, or U+0020. You wouldn't be able to use U+00B7 nor could you use the · character.

I can certainly understand the benefit in having a table that shows all the blue characters, and lists what they mean, and gives the Unicode value of the corresponding actual character. But the Unicode value of the displayed special character seems meaningless.

 

 

[Pyanepsion]

@walt.farrellYou are trying to get around the problem, and that is to your credit. However, I am not allowed to tell you why.
😉I asked the question here to get an answer from Serif. A Serif staff member can indeed easily answer my question.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Pyanepsion said:

A Serif staff member can indeed easily answer my question.

It's only easy if the information is already available in a form that is publicly accessible. Otherwise it is not so easy

[Pyanepsion]

Why would you want such information, which should be included in the instructions for use, not to be accessible to the user!

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

Why would you want such information, which should be included in the instructions for use, not to be accessible to the user!

All the user needs to know is what the blue characters mean. The Unicode values of those characters are meaningless, as the user cannot use them for anything within Publisher, and they do not exist outside Publisher.

That's why I asked my question in the first place. Yes, some of the information you asked for is meaningful and should be available. But some (specifically, the Unicode values of those blue characters) is not meaningful, and if available in a table like that will be confusing because the users will think they can use it in some way.

[Old Bruce]

Thinking about this has me wanting such a list. 

A graphic representation, the unicode number, the name and finally a brief plain User language description of it.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Thinking about this has me wanting such a list. 

A graphic representation, the unicode number, the name and finally a brief plain User language description of it.

I can see the need for the unicode number of the actual character represented by the blue graphic character, if that's what you mean. It would be helpful for those cases where Find/Replace doesn't give you a way to add them via the pulldown menus.

And certainly the graphic representation and the description are needed so we can understand what we're seeing when we look at our files (perhaps, especially, when we're looking at someone else's file, or something imported from another application like InDesign.

[Wosven]

On 7/8/2021 at 3:57 PM, walt.farrell said:

I'm curious what benefit that specific one would have, or actually the table in general.

I've got a similar table of all symbols used in ID, and that's sort of my bible, always following we, in a stack of paper near each PC.

It's used to reconize symbols you barely use but need to understand why it's in the document you're working on, to help write regular expressions without extra-clicks like you write in your own language, writing scripts in which you can't use the app's own symbols but need unicode values, etc.

It goes with some post-its with alt+xxxx most usefull -- but not so frequently typed -- characters unavailable on the keyboard, or table with Zapf Dingbats / Wingdings / etc.  symbols/characters you don't want to spend more than few second searching in a glyphs panel...

It is certainly important in an app unable yet to memorize search & replace queries.

 

And another important point is it can help learn to use some of those characters you don't even know (or read about long ago), or just help retrieving the relevant one you forget (this one you're searching, you know you read about it somewhere... supposed to do this or that and that you need right now!).

[MikeTO]

I made a list today