I'm sorry to break it to ya, my friend, but it's not that simple (at least not as much as you may think). The problem is NOT with keyboards, Markus, but with e-mailers an internet systems that unfortunately screw things up.
For instance, mine, angelfire, simply cannot handle these "special characters". It's just the way it is. We, internet users, have unfortunately NO control over how keyboard typings will ultimately render when received by other servers/computers, etc (despite its going OUT of our computers correctly, mind you!!!). THAT is unfortunately a fact. Marcus On Wed, 17 Jul 2002 17:27:20 Markus Kuhn wrote: >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 0 or 5. 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 0C? > >Yes, this is the correct degree symbol. > >Unfortunately, Microsoft ships some fonts, where : (male ordinal >indicator) and 0 (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 0C 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/> > > Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
