Using Special Characters in Titles

printable version

For technical purposes that will become clearer later, this document is upside-down. If this is your first visit, skip to the bottom for explanations and instructions.

Why does this document exist?

This document helps users to make titles with special characters from the "upper 128" of the ISO-8859-1 character set. For technical reasons, an explanation, as well as instructions for use, are down here at the bottom.

The basic idea is to build an entity-free title in the E2 search box at the top of the document. Some people are not able to type in special characters, nor do they have the Windows Character Map program available. Such people can come here an build their titles.

Since we're working with the search box, it's a good idea to keep it as close as possible to the special characters that will be used the most frequently: lower-case accented characters and umlauts. That's why it's upside-down.

An Explanation of the table

The table above displays the upper 128 characters of the ISO-8859-1 character set. Each cell contains four pieces of information about a specific character:

Code

is the numeric (decimal) code for the character. If the code appears in ITALICS, the corresponding character IS NOT an acceptable character in a node title. If the code appears in BOLD, the corresponding character IS an acceptable character in a node title.

Character

is the visual representation of the character.

Entity

is the associated HTML entity for the character. If the entity appears in parentheses, it's actually a different entity that has an identical appearance.

Alternate forms

indicate acceptable alternate forms for the character.

Which special characters are acceptable in titles, and why?

Acceptable special characters:

• should indicate a pronunciation that is not represented by an unadorned Roman letter. This leaves out all of the symbol characters.
• should be standard. This leaves out all of the characters with codes 128-159.
• should not be a dipthong or a ligature.

How to use this node for your titles

• Ordinary Users can use this document to build a title string to search for a node (and possibly create a new node), as wel as find out if it's necessary to create "alternate version" nodeshells that get linked to the "correct" title.
• Gods can use this document to build an entity-free title string for renaming nodes. Build the string in the search box, select the text, then follow all of the steps you normally follow to change a node title. However, instead of typing in the new title as you normally would, paste the string you copied out of this document.

• Simply type ordinary characters in the search box.
• For each special character, look for its entry in the table above.
  • If the character is acceptable for a node title, copy the visual representation of the character from the table, and paste it into the search box.
  • If the character is not acceptable, type in the character's alternate form instead. If there's no alternate form, DON'T USE IT. At any rate, try to avoid putting a symbol in a title if at all possible. We demand this for factual writeups.

Finally, if you create a node that had acceptable special characters, create a nodeshell where all of the special characters are replaced by alternate forms. For Germanic titles containing umlauts, you may have to create two nodeshells. Then ask an editor to firmlink the nodeshell to the correct title for you.

But wait, there's more:

You may not need to use this document. You may, of course, have Windows Character map available. But a much simpler way to do it may already be available: Type a title into the search box, replacing special characters with the corresponding HTML entity sequences. So, if you're looking for "Süper Düper Title", type "Samp;uuml;per Düper Title". Then search for the sequence. Hopefully, you'll get a "Nothing found" or a results list. At the bottom of the results node, you'll see:

Simply copy "Sόper Dόper Title" from between the quotes and paste it into the edit box, and click "Create Node". Presto!