special characters

[juldea]

According to this page, I've been using the wrong symbol for degrees. I've been using the "masculine ordinal" (?) when I should be using "degree" (?). I apologize profusely!! ;)

EDIT: Bah, apparently LJ doesn't like to show special characters. Sniffle. The point is still valid, however. You just can't see the examples (I turned them into question marks so that I don't break any friends' pages).

Comments

[greyhame.livejournal.com]

It has nothing to do with LiveJournal; special characters in one computer's character set aren't necessarily going to make any sense in another's. What you want to be using are the HTML character entity references. There's a chart of them on the W3C's site (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html#h-24.2.1). To use one, you put the text listed after "<!ENTITY" inbetween a & and a ;. So for the degree symbol, you'd type "&deg;", and you'd get °. It's also the correct way to do accents, like &eacute; for é or &ouml; for ö.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

♥

Nifty! :)

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Though with Unicode becoming more pervasive, there's more likelihood that special characters can survive. I know I've just typed some (which is much easier on a Mac) which have shown up fine when I looked at the LJ entry from Win XP. I've used æ (ae), and º (the degree sign), before, I know. But perhaps I'm being naïve.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Windows understands UTF-8 just fine, but the Alt+NumPad approach generates Microsoft 8-bit ASCII, which is something else entirely. MacOS does the right thing these days; Windows does not.

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Yeah ALT+# is legacy. Character Map on Windows generates UTF-8.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

*whine* But alt+# is what I have memorized!!!

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Hmm, looks like I replied to her a bit early, before reading the other responses... ;)

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Yep, I've generally been able to copy text from Unicode apps and have them survive transformations through different browsers and LJ. LJ is Unicode-based now so if you're O/S and browser support it, you're all set.

Of course, remembering the entity tags for your favorites is ‘ƒuИ’ and nostalgic. (That word should be 'fun', by the way...)

Go beyond the HTML4 list and things get even more fun complex.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Ooh look, mr_teem has a clue!! ;)

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Actually, just the pic does. I can't find the actual clue... :-(

[juldea.livejournal.com]

So what manner do you use to type them? I was using alt+#### and LJ wouldn't show them, but as greyhame showed me, if I use the & stuff ; method (without spaces) it works. How many different ways of displaying characters ARE there?!

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Heh. Don't get me started... :-)

Assuming you're Windows based, you can't go wrong with Character Map. (Should be somewhere like Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools; you can use Start/Help to look it up if it doesn't look like it's there.)

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. Start/run/charmap works too. But I prefer just having something to type... I'm lazy!

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

The Mac keyboard makes typing these much nicer. Each of the accents is bound to a key, and used as a prefix. I type alt-u, followed by a vowel, to get that vowel with a ¨ over it. So, ï was typed as alt-u, i, and ë is alt-u, e. The degree sign, º, is alt-0, and æ is stuck on alt-' which isn't as intuitive, but fine once you know it. They try to make some sense. For example, alt-s is ß.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Actually, now that you say so I remember that, because I was working on a Mac for a short time while taking German. I agree, it's a much better system than the Windows...