Wikipedia talk:Special characters/Archive 1: Difference between revisions

At the moment, the "Wiki special characters" page is worded as a personal recommendation. After some shakeout, editing and decision making, it should probably be reworded to take out the first-person references.

Below is the old contents of the "Wiki ASCII codes page". The codes it lists will not work on many machines (particulary the ones listed as 158, 159, 169, 228, 229, 231, 232, 247), and don't even exist at the codes claimed. For example, if you type Alt-151 on a Windows machine, you are actually entering code 249, because that's the "new" Windows code page 1252 code for what used to be at position 151 in the now-obsolete pre-Windows code page 437. The use of the table below is dangerous and misleading. The codes listed on Wiki special characters are correct, and conform to what the Bomis server actually claims to send (namely, ISO-8859-1). Larry seems to want to keep this page around for historical reasons, but I disagree. This page is simply in error, and should be removed or redirected. --Lee Daniel Crocker

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ASCII character codes that I think will work for everybody. On many systems you can make these by holding down alt and then, using the number pad, typing the number of the character in question.

128 Ç  136 ê  144 É  152 ÿ  160 á  168 ¿         184 ©                208 ð  216 Ï  224 Ó  232 Þ         248 °
129 ü  137 ë  145 æ  153 Ö  161 í  169 ®                              209 Ð         225 ß  233 Ú  241 ±  249 ¨
130 é  138 è  146 Æ  154 Ü  162 ó  170 ¬                              210 Ê         226 Ô  234 Û         250 ·
131 â  139 ï  147 ô  155 ø  163 ú                                     211 Ë         227 Ò  235 Ù
132 ä  140 î  148 ö  156 £  164 ñ                                     212 È         228 õ  236 ý  244 ¶
133 à  141 ì  149 ò  157 Ø  165 Ñ  173 ¡  181 Á  189 ¢                              229 Õ  237 Ý  245 §
134 å  142 Ä  150 û  158 ×  166 ª  174 «  182 Â  190 ¥  198 ã         214 Í         230 µ  238 ¯  246 ÷
135 ç  143 Å  151 ù  159 ?         175 »  183 À         199 Ã         215 Î         231 þ         247 ¸

If anything on this table shows up as a normal symbol, like a question mark or underscore, it isn't working and you should erase it so the rest of us know not to use it. On some computers these don't show up properly, but at least default to something similar: 158 (times sign -> x), 167 (underlined ° -> °), 213 (undotted i -> i).

One can also enter ANSI characters by holding down alt and typing in a number prefixed with a zero. However, one probably shouldn't, since they don't show up on some machines.

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These are delightful. However, I'd like to remind everyone not to use these in page names (i.e. in URLs that you create), because it is my understanding that they will not generally work. However, if I'm totally wrong, I hope someone will correct me. --Jimbo Wales

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Is anyone taking into consideration that "not everyone" keeps their character map (charmap) set to the default? I for one, don't even remember what the default was/is. --Anonynmous

Not sure whether that "character map" setting refers to Linux or Windoze. However, looking at these (character set) pages (on Linux, using NS 6.0 called to my attention that the "Schumacher-clean" font, which claims to be ISO-8859-1 (and which I had recently set as the default Monospace font for Netscape and as the font for my editor (Vim), because it looks good) is not. All the glyphs for character codes above 16#7F displayed as the same funny symbol. OTOH, the "misc-fixed" font seems to be full ISO-8859-1 and displays all the symbols here correctly. --Jason Scribner

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I have a W98 with MSIE5.5 running, but the &sum character sign does not appear. Formulas which use this character aren't displayed correctly. Do other Windows people have the same problem?? Sigma is displayed correctly and could serve as a sum sign too. --StefanRybo

Looks ok for me under Win98SE/IE5.5, but long ago I grabbed the free fonts from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/free.htm and other locations, so that may be why. BTW, my default font is sans-serif, so the Greek letters look pretty plain (pi looks like a 3-sided box); the prod (∏) and sum (∑) glyphs retain the serifs and are larger too. See Hornlo/Test for some side-by-side, so to speak, comparisions of similar entity markups. They all, except the last 4 on the page, display correctly for me. --loh.