- Law 22: Use symbols and special characters as needed.
There will be times when you need to include
symbols and characters in your documents,
that can't be found on your standard keyboard.
These characters include things like
special punctuation marks, registered trademark
symbols, copyright symbols, degree symbols,
accented characters, and so on.
It can be really tempting to be a little lazy
and not include these special characters
in your documents, but they are not hard to use
and should be included when needed.
This is especially true of what are called
diacritical marks and diacritical marks are
symbols added to letters of the alphabet that
indicate a different pronunciation.
Accent marks are a type of diacritical mark
that you're probably familiar with.
You can see on screen, some other
examples of diacritical marks.
Now the English language does not contain
many native words that use diacritical marks,
but many, many other languages,
including French, Italian, German, Spanish,
and others, they do use a lot of diacritical marks.
The English language contains words
that have been borrowed from some of these
languages, that also require these diacritical marks.
If a word needs a diacritical mark
to be spelled correctly, use it.
For example, in Spanish, the word si without
an accent mark over the i, is not the same
as the word si with an accent mark over the i.
This first word translates to if in English.
The second word with the accent mark translates to yes.
So you can see, it's really important
to get these marks correct.
You could actually change the meaning
of words by misusing or not including diacritical marks.
This is especially important when
you're dealing with people's names.
Leaving off or misusing a necessary
diacritical mark is like misspelling a person's name.
You do not want to do that in your documents.
Symbols include things like degree symbols,
mathematical symbols, monetary symbols, and so on.
Depending on the type of documents
that you create and the content
that you're working with, you may
frequently need to use some of these symbols,
and so it's really important that you know
how to do that and how to access these symbols.
There are a lot of different ways
that you could access these symbols
and accented characters on a computer.
If you use certain symbols and characters
often enough, you'll memorize how
to create them really quickly.
For the special characters that you
haven't memorized, learn how to access
special characters in your operating system,
and in the software package that you're using.
Here are a few tips to help you get started.
On Macintosh computers, a really easy
way to insert diacritical marks is to
put your cursor in your document
and hold down a letter on the keyboard.
Any diacritical marks that exist for that letter
will appear and you simply select the one you want.
This works in email and it works
in text messages on iPhones.
Further special characters on a Macintosh
computer, you could use what's called
the character viewer or the keyboard viewer.
If you use a computer with the Windows
operating system, look for what's called
the character map or the international keyboard utility.
For web designers, to make special characters
and accented letters show up on your web pages,
you're going to use a special set of codes
that are called character entities.
You'll insert these character entities into
your HTML code and then a web browser
is going to display the corresponding
symbols or characters that you coded.
You could do an online search for
character entities and you will get plenty of
information that gives you all of these
special codes to use in your web pages.
Keep in mind that not all typefaces
include these special characters.
The typeface designer has to create these
characters and include them in the typeface.
Even though there are many, many websites
out there where you can download free typefaces,
many of these freebies do not include
symbols and special characters.
If you're creating a document and you know
you're going to need the use of
special characters, before you pick a typeface,
before you decide on the final typeface,
make sure that the typefaces you're looking at
contain the special characters that you need.
Let's summarize.
When you're typesetting and designing documents,
be aware that the text may require the use
of symbols and special characters
that don't appear on a standard keyboard.
Don't be lazy and just ignore these
special characters, they're not hard to include.
Learn how to access the special characters
in the software and operating system that you're using.
If a word contains a special character,
then it needs that character to be spelled correctly.
That's Law 22: Use symbols and special characters as needed.