10. Special Characters

How do you display...

© € £ ¾ symbols on my page?

Sometimes you may need the feel to use a special character in an HTML document, an accent or diacritical mark. The ones that are known as ISO These special characters are marked in HTML as:

    &xxx;

Where XXXX is the code name for the special character you wish to use. To create the special character for the German umlaut (ü), or the copyright symbol (©) we need to use the HTML:

    ü to get ü  or © to get ©

For example, in the Terminology of Vulcanology of our Venus Volcano tours, we are going to want to add an explanation of a technical term that was used to describe a particular type of volcanic flow. This term nuee ardente is from the French term for "glowing cloud"; but to use the proper spelling we need an "acute" accent, so that the word appears as nuée ardente. In this case, we replace the first e in nuee with the HTML for the acute accented "é" é

Now we are going to add a sentence to our HTML document that uses an accented letter:

1. Open the HTML file, issapissin.htm in your text editor.
2. Add the following text to you page below your </pre> tag.

   <p>
    The term <i>nu&eacute;e ardente,</i> or 
    "glowing cloud" was first used by La Croix (1904)
    in his description of the volcanic flows he observed in 
    the 1902 eruption of Mt Pel&eacute;e, a historically 
    active volcano on the island of Martinique. We see these
    occur daily from Mt. Issapissin where our tour takes you.
   </p>

3. Save and Reload the HTML file.

HTML ESCAPE SEQUENCES

The HTML for the accent mark is just one example of the more general class of tags known as escape sequences. In entering HTML so far, you may have wondered what I have to do when I need to use a < (less-than) or a > (greater-than) sign in my page? These two characters, plus the & (ampersand) have special meaning in HTML and cannot be used as typed straight from the keyboard into you HTML document. Instead, use the escape sequences:

   &lt;    displays  <  (less-than)
   &gt;    displays  >  (greater-than)
   &amp;   displays  &  (ampersand)		
			

NOTE: In doing this, your browser displays the symbol on your web page and does not interpret it as the beginning of a HTML tag or think you are entering a ampersand for a ESCAPE SEQUENCE, it merely displays what it is.

EXTRA SPACES

As you have seen in previous lessons, a web browser ignores all extraneous spaces in your HTML files. However, there may be times when you really want to have more than one space in your sentences. When? Some web creators like to have two spaces following the period at the end of the sentence. But what if you wanted to indent the first sentence of every paragraph? Or how about having a single word with its individual letters spaced far apart?

The HTML code for adding extra space characters is again a special character known as the "non-breaking space":

    

Here are a few examples of how you might use the non-breaking space:

HTML Code	Page Result
The text here now is double spaced.
<b> H &nbsp; E &nbsp; A &nbsp; D &nbsp; I &nbsp; N &nbsp; G </b>	H   E   A   D   I   N   G

HTML Code	Page Result
The start of this sentence is now indented.
   Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah	Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah

You may want to experiment and try different ways to use the non-breaking space in your page. At this time, we will not modify our HTML documents, but you may, if you wish, add the code for indenting each opening sentence of all of your paragraphs using two or three instances of the special code for the non-breaking space.

Click Here if you wish to view a full list of special characters.

Practice
In your own HTML document; add a foreign word that requires a special accent or a mathematical expression that uses the < or > symbol. Or, add some extra spaces to indent your paragraphs.

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