Jim Elwell wrote on 2002-07-15 16:35 UTC: > My understanding is that special symbols do not always show up properly
Please don't call then "special symbols", just because you happen to have a keyboard that doesn't have a key for � or �. These are perfectly normal character set elements, and the standard keyboards of many countries have them as regular keys. > However, by way of checking this, does 41.7 �C show up properly? No. You picked the wrong symbol. You used the superscript o, which is the male Spanish ordinale indicator, as in premiero = 1� > How about 41.7 �C? Yes, this is the correct degree symbol. Unfortunately, Microsoft ships some fonts, where � (male ordinal indicator) and � (degree) are very difficult to distinguish. On the much more helpful X Windows System 6x13 font, which I use to type this, the male ordinal indicator is an underlined superscript o, therefore �C immediately looks very wrong, whereas �C looks perfectly correct. People entering text without having been properly trained to do this correctly leads to rapidly degrading practice in typography. I almost got used to hardly anyone being able to correctly distinguish between the HYPHEN and MINUS characters in Word for instance (HYPHEN is the short dash between words, MINUS is much longer, just like the horizontal bar in the + sign, similar to the EN DASH used to indicate a range of numbers). It makes sense to be familiar with the different easily confuseable characters in the ISO 10646 and Unicode character sets, such as U00B0 = DEGREE SIGN U00BA = MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR or U002D = HYPHEN-MINUS U2010 = HYPHEN U2013 = EN DASH U2014 = EM DASH U2212 = MINUS SIGN Literature: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
