I experimented this afternoon with a new naming scheme for my repos and sources. I wanted to group the items by giving the same prefix to items belonging in the same “category”. I also wanted this prefix to be visually “suggestive” of the the cartegory.
Consequently, I started to play with symbol-like glyphs and combining diacritical marks.
One of my attempts involved U+2139 INFORMATION SOURCE followed by U+20DD COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE in the hope of getting a circled bold lowercase i (subject to limitation of fonts, of course). This works fine in document processors like LibreOffice Writer, but when pasted into Gramps entry boxes, the two glyphs are not combined but displayed sequentially.
This may perhaps be an issue with GTK+ widgets.
Last minute: I tried to create a directory with the above name in KDE Dolphin with the same failure (toolkit is Qt there, not GTK+).
Is there any way to enter any valid Unicode sequence and get it displayed as expected?
Thanks Dave, but I didn’t mention one of my constraints: I try not to pick glyphs from the Supplementary Multilingual Plane or higher planes because there are presently few fonts providing these glyphs.
In addition, they are frequently considered “emojis” and end up in colour fonts while I’d like “neutral” B/W glyphs. In theory, this can be fixed by suffixing the codepoint with a Variant Selector but they don’t work correctly in document processing applications and I don’t expect them to work in Gramps which has no super-sophisticated Unicode management (it is not necessary for its purpose). And my experiment already shows mismanagement of “simple” combining marks.
EDIT
After a few more experiments, it appears the issue is closely related to the font used by Gramps. Since there is no way to customise this font, I modified the global environment by selecting a different face in the OS configuration. After careful choice (but I am not satisfied by its aesthetics), I get correct expected combining mark behaviour.
So, not a bug, but a general issue in font machinery (I am under Fedora 42 with KDE Plasma desktop). I settled down on Free Sans but this is not my favourite.
I work with as few add-ons as possible. I didn’t install this one.
I don’t mind changing the font in session system preferences because I have one account on my machine per activity (in order to protect “outside” data against my own mistakes). So this is not a big bargain to alter the system font on this single session dedicated to Gramps, even if it not not “aesthetic” for my taste.