Monday 2 April 2007

Circumflexing their muscles

I don't want to go blaming my tools or nuffin', but for reasons that elude even my investigative snout, this here blogging device has turned off the diacritical markers. Perhaps the authorities don't realise that some of us rely on our daily circumflex to get the blood trickling.

Even so, they must know that Charlotte Bronte is nothing without her diaeresis, that the ancien regime suffers acute withdrawal pangs, that some of us ethnic minority types from the outer Hebrides can't type out our full nomenclature properly without resorting to the grave (no thanks, Ma & Pa Harlot, bless 'em, for the Gaelic middle name).

Where have you gone, oh cirumflex? Hotel Harlot looks cheap and tawdry without you.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't resist being the first one to say that Lexicon's suffering is acute. Tah dah!!!

Anonymous said...

Except now I belatedly realise she had already done that pun in her post. (Slinks away with tail between legs, managing a feeble nervous wag every now and again.)

Alexis, Baron von Harlot said...

Ha! I'm happy to share the glory on that one, Woolly. Such as the glory is. But where oh where oh where are my circumflexes? I can make 'em work with Word, but for some reason Mozilla is resisting all attempts - both on blogger and, I've just realised, my miscellaneous email programs. WOE.

Anonymous said...

I'm very impressed that you even know how to do them outside Word! I have all sorts of battles with Hordak (my computer) over this sort of thing.

Mr Mean said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mr Mean said...

In HTML the (prescribed and) most reliable way to insert diacritical marks is to use character entity references. For example, to insert a lowercase 'o' with circumflex, one would put 'ô' in the text string, such that 'Hôtel' would be entered as 'Hôtel' in the editor in Blogger.

You use an iBook, Lexi, don't you? I just did a quick search on the Web (since I'm not familiar with MacOS), and found these instructions on the Apple web site. Is that how you tried to go about it in your e-mail applications?

In all versions of Microsoft Windows on the PC, bring up the Character Map (usually in Programs→Accessories→System Tools), click on the particular character you want to insert, and it will show you the particular keystroke sequence to use. For example, 'ô' is Alt-0244 (on the numeric keypad). This should work in most, if not all, Windows apps.

Alexis, Baron von Harlot said...

Thanks, Mr Mean. Thing is, now that I'm at my work 'puter (also a mac), I find that they're working poifectly, the old fashioned easy way I've come to know and love (option + one of an array of vowels). I cân ëmphasise whatéver syllable I wànt. I'll fiddle around with the household ibook. Your assistance, nonetheless, much appreciated.

TimT said...

A case of cirrhosis in the diaresis?

I've known other bloggers to use such unsophisticated techniques as cut and paste!

Things could be worse: my blog for some reason ruins all such accent marks. I have an occasional hankering for the umlaut that remains sadly unfulfilled because of my blog's fickleness.

Mr Mean said...

That being the case, Alexis, you may want to start with looking at any differences between the Character Encoding settings for the browser (in the View menu for the current page, and under the Advanced section in the Content tab in Tools→Options for the default character enconding, in Firefox) on your Macs. UTF-8 works pretty well for transmitting all sorts of special and foreign language characters.