Special characters in title

Freeway
1

If I put a special character, the registered trademark symbol ® in the page Title, will all browsers display it?

There was a thread a while ago which said all browsers will display special characters in the Title, but I’m hesitant because I used the ® symbol in a plain text email recently and when the recipient replied to me, the ® had become “(r)”! Would the recipient have seen “(r)” or would they have seen the proper symbol?

Thanks

Mark

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2

Well, for anyone who’s looking at this on line, and wondering why
everything is looking like a registered trademark symbol, that’s
because the lower-case letter R inside of parentheses is silently
replaced by the Web software with a real (and superscript) registered
mark. Ditto for tm, similarly treated.

But back to your question. It depends on the browser, but the Title
tag should allow any Unicode character, or ASCII with the & reg;
(space added after the ampersand to keep it from converting) entity.
Freeway should manage this encoding for you, depending on how you have
set your Document Setup preferences.

I wouldn’t worry about the conversion that happened somewhere in the e-
mail system. E-mail is not at all the same as HTML, and a browser is
not an e-mail client, and vice-versa.

Very likely, the character ®, which is above ASCII code 127 (the limit
for low-bit text e-mail) was translated automatically somewhere.
Portions of the E-mail system are still limited to 7-bit text, as the
original creators of the system intended, which is why you’re limited
to that lower 128 portion of the ASCII table. But more recent
extensions to the basic mail protocols have made it possible (and more
popular) to use Unicode text (basically any character, in any language
or encoding scheme), or to send all sorts of Viagra ads as HTML, and
to basically annoy the neck-beards no end. (Raises hand timidly,
afraid that being lumped in with neck-beards is maybe socially
unacceptable, still madly in love with TEXT e-mail and unafraid to
admit that.)

Even though you may start out with what looks like a plain text
message on your computer, it’s still being coded as 8-bit Unicode by
Apple Mail. But when it leaves your computer for its journey, it may
pass through some backwater of the net where 7-bit mail is the
standard, and relaying mail servers may do the right thing by down-
converting your Unicode text to ASCII so it will fit through the
narrower pipes.

Walter

On Apr 7, 2011, at 5:17 AM, Mark wrote:

If I put a special character, the registered trademark symbol ® in
the page Title, will all browsers display it?

There was a thread a while ago which said all browsers will display
special characters in the Title, but I’m hesitant because I used the
® symbol in a plain text email recently and when the recipient
replied to me, the ® had become “(r)”! Would the recipient have seen
“(r)” or would they have seen the proper symbol?

Thanks

Mark

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3

Hi Walter

Thanks for that. Just one thing. I’ve typed out “(R)” (using a lower case R) in FW and previewed it in a browser and it hasn’t been replaced by a superscript ® like you said it would. Why not? I like the idea that it makes it a superscript (trying to set up a style for superscript in FW has been a pain).

Cheers

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4

No, what I was describing had to do with FreewayTalk.net, the Web
version of this mailing list. That system, which I wrote, includes a
whole lot of shortcuts to typographical niceties to make Web text more
“correct”.

Freeway, being a good Mac desktop publishing application, follows the
normal keyboard shortcuts for the extended characters. On a US English
keyboard, that would Option-r to make the registered trademark, Option-
g to make the Copyright symbol, Option-2 to make a Trademark symbol,
etc.

You don’t need to memorize these incantations, either, just make sure
that the International menu is installed on your toolbar (little flag
icon near the time in the top-right) and then pull down to either
Keyboard Viewer (simpler) or Character Palette (the fire-hose of
characters). In KV, just hold down the Option key or Shift + Option,
and look at the keycaps of the tiny keyboard for the character you’re
looking for. Keys which highlight in yellow when you press Option are
compound characters. Press Option-u and then u again, and you get the
“LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS” character you’ve been looking
for for that hair-metal band logo.

Walter

On Apr 7, 2011, at 9:39 AM, Mark wrote:

Hi Walter

Thanks for that. Just one thing. I’ve typed out “(R)” (using a lower
case R) in FW and previewed it in a browser and it hasn’t been
replaced by a superscript ® like you said it would. Why not? I like
the idea that it makes it a superscript (trying to set up a style
for superscript in FW has been a pain).

Cheers

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5

Thanks Walter

M.

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