Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Tuesday Tech †ip

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I was planning on starting this series next week, but a quick post idea occurred to me.

Many genea-bloggers have ancestors from foreign countries which often use foreign characters in their character sets. You may know how to draw those characters in your own handwritten notes, and may even be able to get your word processor to reproduce them. However, you may not know how to blog them.

Here's a cheat-sheet.

In the first column you will see what the character looks like. The last column is a description of the character. The middle three columns provide three different codes you can use: "Friendly", Numerical, and Hex. Not every character has a 'friendly' code, which are easier to remember, but they all have the other two. [Note: link above updated from original link to a source with a more complete list]

For example

á is a "lowercase a acute". It is reproduced by typing: á (where that first character is an ampersand.) or á or á

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info! But, there are several Polish letters that aren't on the list. I guess I'll have to figure out what the html is and send them in. Fortunately for me, Word allows me to choose the Polish and German letters I need, and when I copy and paste into Wordpress it seems to display them correctly on the page. Or at least I think they display correctly - now I'm going to have to try a different browser to make sure!
Donna

Lori Thornton said...

Thank you. I feel so cheated when we don't have the drop-down menus on blogger to use! I'm printing it off. It's just been too time-consuming to hunt the letter down when I'm in the midst of a post for the occasional character I need to use.