The Copyright Symbol ©
Inserting the copyright symbol
by Puddin'
While it's possible to simulate a proper copyright symbol like this: (c)
It looks a little more elegant to use the authentic character: ©
It's not hard. All you have to do is type what's called an entity in the HTML/Web world, either a named (or mnemonic) entity using alphabetic characters or a numeric entity using assigned numbers, either option surrounded by "escape" characters that let your Web browser know that it should do something "special" with the mnemonic characters or assigned numbers. The escape characters are the ampersand (&) and the semicolon (;)
The numeric entity that will be turned into the copyright symbol is:
©
The mnemonic entity that will be turned into the copyright symbol is:
©
If you want to display an actual code in the screen text, as I do here to show you how to do it, you will have to "escape" the leading ampersand like this:
©
although Big Closet sometimes ignores the "escaped" escape ampersand character, especially with numeric codes. Test it before you commit your edit. Luckily, there are few reasons to do this, other than to be absolutely certain that an intended ampersand will be properly displayed, so Big Closet's odd behaviour isn't usually a problem.
There are a raft of others which can be found here:
if you want to "spice up" your text with authentic accented characters (É), most common Greek letters (Ψ), and whatnot (¶).
It's important to use the actual escape character, and not some clever symbol inserted by your word processor, because different computers use different symbol sets, and if you use a character that's not in the user's character set, it will look something like this: ’ or this Â, when you meant something else entirely.
The default character set for the Internet is essentially the characters you can see on your keyboard. If the character you want isn't there, you have to "escape it" with an "entity" as shown above.
While not a "character," a lot of authors have good and sufficient reason to want to use indented text. Whilst there are a number of kludges floating about using non-breaking spaces and the like, the most reliable way to generate indented text is with HTML <blockquote> tags, which should be used in pairs like this:
<blockquote>
Stuff to be indented.
</blockquote>
Pay particular attention to the stroke (or forward slash) in the last "blockquote" tag since, if you don't close the tag pair properly, your text will start wandering to the right.
All of the above indented text was generated in just this manner.
An easy way to generate a pair of these tags online is to use the Q button at the top of the Big Closet editing screen.
You can then cut and paste them anywhere, or insert them at the point where you want the text indented and than cut and copy the closing tag and move it to where you want the indentation to stop.
Have fun!
Comments
Please don't use the TM symbol
I'm not a lawyer but I'm quite sure that the TM symbol is not required in running text in fiction (in fact I Googled it some while back). And each occurrence pushes me out of the story even harder than a typo would, so please don't use it. It's true that I haven't seen any in recent stories, but there were quite a few of them in stories by several authors a few years ago when I started reading BCTS.
Puddin's note above is helpful, but I'd rather not see any authors get any silly ideas about TM now that she's explained how to add weird typography.
Oh, and don't for one second imagine that I don't realize what your comments to this comment will look like :-) Do your worst. But if you break the posting software while doing it, don't blame me.
- Moni
Indeed...
I have no quarrel whatsoever with your excellent caution about trademarks. Trademark symbols are used in advertising copy by trademark owners, or those representing such owners, not by the general public, unless you claim a competing trademark on the name, in which case claim away and have a good lawyer on retainer. For the same reason, if you mention the name of a modern book, let's say Catcher in the Rye, it would be the error of an amateur to include any sort of copyright notice after the title.
Almost everyone alive today probably knows that Fiat, Lamborghini, BMW, and Jaguar are trade names for brands of cars and, if they're not, they haven't been paying much attention. If you mention them in a story, that's a fair use, unless you simultaneously claim to manufacture them and offer them for sale, which would be a violation of their worldwide trademark, since you're using the name in trade.
Puddin'
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There's a joke about the appearance of trademarks in athletic circles, where famous athletes are paid to wear and/or endorse the products of particular manufacturers. One famous cyclist, for example, went so far as to tattoo the name Gillette on his legs, because, he claimed, and the manufacturer believed, that the close shave Gillette blades offered made a significant difference in his times. One day, whilst giving an interview in the showers, a reporter noticed that his virile member had the word "AD" tattooed on it and quipped that the space must be to let. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that if the nosy reporter were a beautiful young woman instead of an old man with a beer belly, it would quickly say "ADIDAS™."
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Trademarks
RAMI
The article is from Wikepedia.
It refers to Trademarks.
An author can trademark their name, a story, photo, movie, song, etc. gets a copyright. The law, rules and regulations reagrding trademarks and copyrights are different.
A trademark or trade mark,[1] identified by the symbols ™ (not yet registered) and ® (registered), is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to identify that the products and/or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities. A trademark is a type of intellectual property, and typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements.[2] There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.
The owner of a registered trademark may commence legal proceedings for trademark infringement to prevent unauthorized use of that trademark. However, registration is not required. The owner of a common law trademark may also file suit, but an unregistered mark may be protectable only within the geographical area within which it has been used or in geographical areas into which it may be reasonably expected to expand.
The term trademark is also used informally to refer to any distinguishing attribute by which an individual is readily identified, such as the well known characteristics of celebrities. When a trademark is used in relation to services rather than products, it may sometimes be called a service mark, particularly in the United States.[3]
RAMI
© no evil…
Hi, just seeing if my way works. I went to INSERT on the Microsoft Word I wrote this on and found the © symbol, inserted it. Let’s see if it shows up here.
I’m not sure why, I never use them. Who’d want to steal my ridiculous stories?
~~~hugs, Laika
Why am I having a hard time posting this? I'm being told my name belongs to a another user. Maybe I shoul've trademarked Laika?
Laika -- Actually...
...you could, although registering a trademark is very expensive, because one has to ferret out all competing uses.
Laika is a very famous name, although one could argue that it became a household word in "The West" when the Soviet Union sent up a little dog into orbit, who was named Laika -- with typical scientific precision (Russian: Лайка, literally meaning "Barker").
Laika Memorial
Laika's Story on Wikipedia
It also happens to be the name of a very famous animation studio:
LAIKA.com
They're the people who made the animated feature film, Coraline.
There's also a UK rock band named Laika, undoubtedly in memory of the little Russian dog:
Laika
Since they feature Laika's name in Cyrillic script on their web site.
Here's another, most probably in memory of the dog.
Laika Medical Record Testbed
The thought of the poor dog floating in space until he died affected a lot of people very badly back then, and it can be argued that the imagery formed part of the background to David Bowie's song about an astronaut similarly doomed to die in space, Space Oddity.
Space Oddity 1969
Space Oddity 2009
And here's a tribute to Laika:
Space Doggity
And another:
Laika Star
Cheers,
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
© is soooo easy on a Mac
All you do is hold down the alt key and type a G and you get ©
Gabi
Gabi.
This is dangerous...
Web pages recognise, as a general rule, only standard ASCII characters. The trademark symbol, despite the fact that you may be able to type it on your keyboard using special key combinations, is not an ASCII symbol, and is not guaranteed to look the same to another user as it looks to you.
Here, for example, is a story from Storysite that uses a Spanish "enye", but looks to some people as if it has big black question marks replacing every instance of them:
http://www.storysitetwo.org/story/realemilybowers~01.html
Do a search for "hanging from a nearby tree" and you'll see them, if you can. The word is piñata, which I here display using the HTML entity. Here it is using the keyboard character: piñata. so let's see if Big Closet understands such things. I know that it does do automatic conversions of at least some entities, but don't know about this one. It looks ok to me, but you decide.
I don't think that Storysite is quite so flexible
Here's another (Chinese) site that generates black question marks:
http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm
Look in the search box at the bottom.
These usually represent "null" characters, which sometimes appear when multi-byte encoding systems are displayed on Western screens not set up for them.
Using the named entities is a way to avoid such problems. It seems like a trivial thing, since you can see the character on your own screen, but other people may not have the same default character sets installed. Windows systems are particularly prone to quirks when viewed on the worldwide stage.
Here is a page almost guaranteed to "break" your browser's ability to display perfectly "normal" characters for some people:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/syloti-nagri.html
These characters are from the Syloti Nagri language, so unless you have the proper fonts installed, you'll see nothing but empty boxes where characters ought to be.
For fun, you can browse through Alan Wood's other language character sets:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/
No computer is likely to be able to properly decipher all of them.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Here the easiest way to
Here the easiest way to place a copyright symbol in an HTML file or a text file using © Microsoft office word. the (c) looks like this ©, just type (c) for ™, just (tm) and for the ® just type (r), it really is that easy, when you save your file is word as a HTML file the symbols are there.
This is hard to explain...
ASCII, the default character set of the Web, is an acronym that stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
It was designed by Americans for US use, but has expanded to cover the world for various technical and political reasons. So the US Dollar sign, $, exists in ASCII. The British Pound sign, £, does not. Neither does the Euro sign, €.
A great number of "work-arounds" were developed to help users in other countries, originating in the IBM mainframe world but extended especially to Windows computers, since they became ubiquitous around the time that international users started demanding that their own character sets appear on their computers, so the French could type Précis instead of Precis, properly placing the acute accent over the "e".
They did this with a concept called "Code Pages," alternative character sets that mapped onto the same keyboards (more or less) that everyone else used but generated different characters when the keys were pressed and made those characters appear on the screen. Essentially, code pages allowed users to have whatever characters they wanted appear on their computers, even languages like Arabic, Russian, and Greek, which don't use the Roman alphabet at all. But this flexibility came at a cost; if your computer expects to see the code page that you and your neighbours use all the time, but is served up a page designed by a Russian, let's say, that Russian text, which looks just fine to the Russian, is mapped onto your code page and looks like garbage.
Technically, code pages were what's called a "kludge" in the inner sanctums of the Computer Nerds, and they still are.
Here, for example, is the partial text of a spam I just received from Russia:
The Russians spammers are not idiots; they just don't care where their spam goes, and it's aimed at people who speak Russian, so they don't bother about trying to use a "universal" solution like Unicode. When I look at their perfectly sensible announcement that Hot Russian Girls Want to Meet Me, and my system isn't set up to handle Russian code pages, it looks just like monkeys typing on those famous typewriters. It doesn't look like Shakespeare yet, so we have a ways to go….
When you type characters from the keyboard, without using a special code, you're depending on all the people who see the page you create having access to the same code page. Usually it works, at least for most characters, but sometimes it doesn't, as we see from the Storysite example in the post above.
Here's more than you ever wanted to know about Code Pages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page
If, as you say, you save to a HTML file, Microsoft may handle the conversion properly, just as Big Closet itself may do, but it's not guaranteed. Entering them explicitly guarantees that the codes will be exactly correct.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Flashback!
Heh,
all this talk about characters and encodings on the web and elsewhere gives me a flashback to when dealing with this was part of my job description. I became comfortable with strange words like "ogonek".
- Moni
Ooooh! Ooooh!
I love ogoneks! One of my first jobs was creating the firmware for an Arabic terminal that automatically flowed typed text into the proper joins and ligatures for more or less literate Arabic, which was loads of fun, considering I didn't actually speak or read Arabic. I had an informant, though, to let me know when I had it wrong. Must have done all right, though, as the company sold a raft of the things to Saudi Arabia. And it was really cool to see the screen squiggle around as one typed the characters, trying on the different forms of each character based on their position in the word and what letters were next to them. The Arabic writing system is rather more complex than English, which lets us jam letters together willynilly.
Ohibbu allughah al arabia!
أحب اللغة العربية
If you have an Arabic font available, the above text will look reasonable, for Arabic. If not, well….
أحب
اللغة
العربية
Isn't that better?
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/arabic.html
The nice thing about those pesky codes is that they're universal, anyone can type them on any computer, and with a bit of effort (you have to have a reasonable Unicode font with Arabic glyphs installed) anyone can see them displayed properly.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had to buy ridiculously overpriced purpose-built terminals, but all my clever work back then is duplicated on any modern computer with no effort at all, so all you have to do to be a fluent Arabic typist is to buy a keyboard with Arabic keycaps and twiddle a setting in your system preferences. Who says there's no progress in the world?
Cheers,
Puddin'
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P.S. Ą — If you can see the preceding character, the little hook on the lower right of the capital "A" is an ogonek. The word means "little tail" in Polish.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style