Section 50. Add Special Characters

50. Add Special Characters

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

SEE ALSO

5 About Using Special Characters

43 Add Text and Links

Special characters such as ƒ §, ‚ , ‚ , and ‚ don't appear on your keyboard, but you might need them to add accents to letters or to show a trademark or copyright, for example. To add these characters in HTML (and others), you have to use a character entity and add it in the code. When you use Composer , though, there is an easy way to add special characters and accents to your page without touching the underlying HTML code.

50. Add Special Characters

KEY TERM

Character entity Character entities are special characters that are not represented in the HTML code as regular characters, but can be added to a page with small blocks of code. For example, the & symbol won't show up in the page if you add it from the keyboard as you would in a word processor. Instead, type & in your HTML and the browser will display the symbol as a regular ampersand when the page is viewed .

1.	Select Characters and Symbols from the Insert Menu This brings up the Insert Character dialog box, where you can select to add accented characters that aren't on the keyboard.
2.	Select the Accent You Want to Apply and Click Insert Click on the Accent Lowercase radio button and, from the drop-down list under letter, select the basic letter that you want. From the Character drop-down list, select the accent you want to apply and then click on Insert . The character you selected is inserted into your page so that you can see it in the Visual Editor , but it is actually inserted as a character entity in your page. In my case, I selected u as the letter I wanted to accent using the grave accent.
3.	Check the HTML Source for the Character Entity Click on the HTML Source View tab at the bottom of the Composer window and scroll to the text in your page where you entered the accented character. Notice that the code actually entered on your page is the character entity. In my case, it is ù . If you use characters with accents, you really do not want to remember each character entity, so this is really a timesaver.
4.	Insert the ‚ Symbol Click on the headline at the end of the line and select Characters and Symbols from the Insert menu. Click on the Common Symbols radio button and, from the Character drop-down list, select a symbol (I use the ‚ symbol) and click on the Insert button. You now have a special symbol added to your text, but it is in the font and size of the text in the line. The mark is also set on the baseline of the text, level with the bottoms of each character.
5.	Set the ‚ Symbol to Superscript Highlight the special symbol you just inserted into the page and, from the Format menu, select Text Style, Superscript . The special symbol should now be smaller and line up with the tops of the characters in the linenot the bottoms.