Gregory's Serverthere is an additional hard problem in computer science: creating a monogrammer for avatar placeholders. how are you supposed to derive a few characters? first one or two characters in a string? what about first/last name? what about hyphenated last name? do you force capitalize it? what about names formatted in some other language that you haven't designed for?
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The naïve approach that I've seen quite a few times is just taking the first two characters and lobbing off the rest. But now you have a bunch of monograms that look like “DR” or “JO” or “PÈ” which makes no sense as a monogram. In Swift, `PersonNameComponentsFormatter` could be useful here. But when I was doing this for a web project, no idea what you’re supposed to do with nothing but some regular expressions and faith that you’ll have something serviceable.  @samhenrigold Not to belittle this whole thing because I know it's fun to solve problems like this in smart ways but... I always came to the conclusion that monograms just aren't worth it and found a different solution, ditching them completely.  @samhenrigold simple solution: use a placeholder icon instead of a monogram and just change the color to something derived from a hash of the name  @samhenrigold In Hungary, we have double letter consonants, like “Sz” which is similar to the english “s”. Székely Géza should be SzG...  @samhenrigold I might use the first letter of the name and make it click-to-edit, so the user has easy and immediate control over their identity whenever they want to. This is a problem that only the person who owns the name can solve. |
some strings you might have to create a monogram for with no clear solution:
"Mhi'ya Iman Le'Paige"
"John Appleseed"
"Dr. Jonathan Maple Appleseed Esq."
"Père Jean-Philippe de Zélicourt"
"Dr. med. Max Mustermann junior, M.A."
"木田 泰夫"
"أحمد الراجحي"