Hidden Characters and other screen symbol icons

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
April 4, 2023
5 replies
680 views

Hi gang,

I make a lot of screenshots and teaching materials that show hidden characters and other onscreen adornment icons. Is there a repository folder where those visuals are stored inside the InDesign app? I have poked through a lot of subfolders, but I cannot locate any folder or file that, if opened, would already have these original icon shapes. Is it in a specialized font file, maybe?

This would save me a lot of screenshot production time if I knew of a file or folder where these icon images reside. Does anyone know?

How to

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Mike Witherell

Author

Community Expert

Thanks Dirk,

Your information agrees with my experimentation. By the time I sift through galaxies of this stuff, and copy, open, inspect, and rename each one, ... I may as well go back to screenshots.

Mike Witherell

D

Dirk Becker

Legend

Hidden characters are rendered using an internal font, similar to Marc's. I guess that font is embedded straight into the code.

Icons and cursors are either custom drawn, or distributed across various plug-in folders.

find /Applications/Adobe\ InDesign\ 2023 -name "idrc_PNG*"

find /Applications/Adobe\ InDesign\ 2023 -name "idrc_SVG*"

The files within those folders are either PNG or SVG, even if they don't have the extension Different folders for dark or light UI, mouse-over variants. PNGs may have duplicates for hires scale (offset +7000), getting replaced by SVG for scalable UI.

A script could collect/copy all the files into a separate location, fix the name and extension, build an overview document and so forth. Not sure whether such a script is publicly around. Even if you get there, the sheer number is overwhelming.

Mike Witherell

Author

Community Expert

Hi @jmlevy

Ah this is just wonderful! Thanks for finding this resource. Thank you, Marc, for making this specialty font file. That solves just about half my quest.

Now if the collective brainpower of this excellent forum can locate all the various frame adornment icons, that would pretty much cover it!

Mike Witherell

Steve Werner

Community Expert

To harness all the collective brainpower to locate frame adornment icons, you could start a new thread with some you can do quickly and let people add to the list.

Mike Witherell

Author

Community Expert

Hi Steve,

Yes, I searched through the postings and didn't spot anything. Years ago, we used to discuss how to edit the splash screen, and that file is still easy to find, but I am looking for something deeper than that.

Mike Witherell