Question

The eternal editor in me wants to know if any of you are aware of character sets that can be used in TWiki. Specifically, I'd like the ability to use em dashes and other characters that are not on the keyboard. If these characters are available, I would appreciate knowing how to access them.

Thanks.

-- CharlieSmith - 26 Mar 2003

Answer

Hi Charlie,

See the TypographyPlugin for em and en dashes. It shouldn't be too hard to extent that to include other extended characters as well. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/TypographyPlugin

BTW, this is the kind of conversation that would be better on twiki.org/Support. That way anybody else with the same question can find the answer without having to ask again.

cheers,

-- MattWilkie - 26 Mar 2003

A very simple but non-intuitive way is to type HTML entities in the topic text. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html

(I copied above e-mail from the TWiki-Dev mailing list into this topic.)

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Mar 2003

Just listing / trying out a few — is it the case that I can take any of the "alphabetic strings" on the referenced page, add "&" as a prefix, and ";" as a suffix and get it to work, or must I type in (and remember) the numeric codes? (It seems to be implied that &<string>; works, but not explicitly stated.)

Here's trying a few (well, one):

&mdash; —> —

Hmm, that works, and that's an excellent one to remember in the HTML / twiki world, because the "workaround" of using a double dash "--" causes problems within (HTML) comments — it is considered the end of a comment, even without the > (like -->).

Now, how about the upside down question mark and exclamation point?

&iexcl; —> ¡

&iquest; —> ¿

¿Can you tell I like the &mdash; (and the &iquest;)?

Now let's confirm that the — doesn't end a comment:

Nope, seems to be OK!!

ToDo: If I (or someone else gets some time, it might be neat to create a list of all the possible HTML entities in the above format, in other words their HTML entity (like &iquest;) and the symbol they produce (¿) -- I'm sure I could do it "semi-automatically" with Word using the learn keystrokes feature, or maybe Perl, awk, sed, or some Linux based editor with the learn keystrokes feature (like nedit). It would probably be good to propose a format and sort sequence before creating the list, although if it were done in a table we could use the sort table feature to sort it in a variety of ways -- then maybe keep it in the original order in the base table.

— RandyKramer - 26 Mar 2003

So, I cut line from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html and reference this page http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/HowToTypeEmDashAndOtherChars

<!ENTITY Ntilde CDATA "Ñ" -- latin capital letter N with tilde, U+00D1 ISOlat1 -->

so &Ntilde give Ñ and "&#209;" gives "Ñ" giv capital N with tilde? RE: Yup. Looks good. Thanks very much.

— CharlieSmith - 26 Mar 2003

Though it doesn't have all the international characters, there is now a SpecialCharacters document which will help users figure out what HTML to use for displaying special characters.

-- AmandaSmith - 20 Feb 2006