How to do Special Characters

[steelsmiter]

Let's say for a moment that I'm a huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett and maybe I want to run a Discworld game*. Lets say maybe I really like footnotes and want to write in the particular style of his in which I include a footnote here and there** but maybe I go on rambling and make more than a half dozen jokes. Now I've seen Terry go as far as four asterisks in a single footnote, but eventually he does daggers and double daggers and that weird little currency symble that's two s's connected vertically, etc. So what I'm asking here, is that once asterisks get boring, how do I include those other symbles like he does?***

^{*Or two, or three.
**Or two or three.
***For Narrative Causality}

[Oniya]

If you're on a Windows-based machine, there's a handy little application called 'Character Map', usually tucked away in 'Accessories' filed under 'System Tools'.  To ensure that your readers can make out the nifty symbols you use, pick a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman, and then scroll down beyond the standard alphanumerics.  You can also use this to do diacritical marks like umlauts, accents, and so forth.  Single-click to zoom in on a character, double-click to put it in the copy-box.

If you find you've got a favored selection, make a Notepad document and paste them in there, and save it to a convenient spot so you can just copy, paste, and go.

(I like to use this code

Code Select Expand

[sup][size=6pt]*[/size][/sup] to give my footnotes that added elevation.)

[steelsmiter]

I forgot about using the superscript button to raise them. I'll stick with the lowest font size on the list though. it's small enough for my liking. EDIT: and I've found 6 point is too small.

As to the uther part about adding things like umlauts, accents, etc. I'm on a Samsung Tablet 2, 10.1 (android OS, not sure where I might find such character maps for android...) I'm given to understand there might be some kind of symbol app out there, but how compatable with BBC code they would be, IDK. Speaking of which, is there some sort of code way to do them?

[Beguile's Mistress]

There is a BBC code for footnotes that can be read by hovering over certain words.  When you hover over the word you see the foot note

[ acronym=Text you want displayed in the hover-box]Text you want displayed on the screen.[ /acronym]

   

[Oniya]

As long as the app displays the extended characters of a standard font, it should be compatible.  It's when you get into things like 'Wingdings' that not everyone has on their computer that it gets dicey.  I did a search on 'Android character map' and saw a few apps available, but I have no way to test them to see how well they work.  On the bright side, many of them were free.

[steelsmiter]

tablets don't have a hover function. What I was meaning was like... I know that there's a Hexidecimal chart somewhere for colors. Also rpol uses several RuBB codes for various special characters but since they're not even straight HTML they probably wouldn't work here, at least I don't think they would. Ihad similar difficulties in translating a table from HTML to BBC. I eventually figured out straight across translation at least for that issue didn't work

EDIT: heck, I may as well try a few
†
‡
™
§
©
®

Nope.

[steelsmiter]

I have to ask: did any of the above codes work for the special symbols? I only ask because it might just be that I can't see them.

[Oniya]

Nope.

If you want (and I think I've guessed the ones you were after with those), I got these from my character map.  You could copy them into a text document for later use.

†
‡
™
§
©
®

[steelsmiter]

Yeah, though I think bookmarking this thread would serve the same purpose unless you delete your post. Don't plan on doing that do you?

[Oniya]

Not at all. Someone else might find it useful, after all. 

[steelsmiter]

Just in case I copied the symbols to the Discworld section of my "Ideas" post