Initials

The text of an avatar, its bigram, has one or two graphemes. The generator chooses it from the name, unless you set AvatarOptions.Bigram.

How the initials are chosen

The name is split into words on whitespace and on the connectors used inside compound names: -, ', ., _ and their typographic variants. Then:

• Two words or more: the first grapheme of the first word, followed by the first grapheme of the last word.
• One word: its first two graphemes.

var threeWords = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("John Michael Doe"); // first and last words
var compound = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("Jean-Pierre");       // connectors split the words
var apostrophe = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("O'Brien");
var singleWord = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("John");            // first two graphemes
var japanese = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("山田太郎");

Assert.Contains(">JD</text>", threeWords);
Assert.Contains(">JP</text>", compound);
Assert.Contains(">OB</text>", apostrophe);
Assert.Contains(">Jo</text>", singleWord);
Assert.Contains(">山田</text>", japanese);

The case of the name is kept: "john doe" gives jd.

The unit is a grapheme, what a reader sees as one character, not a char: an emoji, a flag or a letter followed by a combining accent counts as one. Characters that display nothing, such as zero-width characters, bidirectional controls and combining marks without a base letter, are skipped. A name with nothing visible gives ?.

Choose the initials yourself

Set Bigram to use your own text, for instance initials stored in the user profile:

// The text comes from Bigram, the color still comes from the name
var svg = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("Ada Lovelace", new AvatarOptions { Bigram = "A" });
var fromName = AvatarGenerator.CreateSvg("Ada Lovelace");

Assert.Contains(">A</text>", svg);
Assert.Equal(GetBackground(fromName), GetBackground(svg));

static string GetBackground(string svg) => svg.Split("fill=\"")[1].Split('"')[0];

• Bigram must contain one or two graphemes, without whitespace. Surrounding whitespace is trimmed. Another value throws an ArgumentException.
• Bigram does not change the color: the color always comes from the name. See Stable colors.
• By default, screen readers announce the bigram. See Accessibility.