PlasmaticDragon wrote:
How can we look behind the scenes to see the full list of strings associated with each icon? Where is that weird little file, and where is it stored?
It's not a single file. There are two levels.
First is the basic Unicode level. These are the strings defined by the Unicode Consortium. This is an old-school computer committee, so everything is strictly English. It is a sqlite3 database located at:
/System/Library/Input Methods/CharacterPalette.app/Contents/Resources/CharacterDB.sqlite3
You will need to use the sqlite3 command-line database tool to read this file. It's a simple database. Use a query like this to find everything related to pizza:
select * from unihan_dict where info like "%pizza%";
If you try a few names, you'll notice that this data is incomplete. Not only are many characters missing, everything is in English.
Apple is much more inclusive. While the Unicode Consortium still defines the Unicode characters (please don't ask Apple for those), Apple draws and describes the characters. Apple describes those characters in many different languages. So if a character doesn't have an UPPERCASE ENGLISH name in the CharacterDB, you can look in your favourite language localization directory at:
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreEmoji.framework/Versions/A/Resources
It looks like the Apple name for characters is in the "AppleName.strings" file, in whatever language localization you are looking at, such as "en.lproj" or "fr.lproj".
You can open this file using BBEdit. Technically it is a "properly list" text database so there are fancier tools you could use as well.
