Special Characters
Q. For Web usage, what’s the preferred method for indicating diacritical marks that do not exist in the HTML Document Character Set, such as the long vowel marks over certain Latin vowels and in transliterated Greek and Japanese?
A. If it is your mission to cast a wide net that allows most browsers and therefore most users to see your intended characters, you might look at the method employed by the Perseus Digital Library ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/), which has used circumflexes rather than macrons in its transliterations of classic texts. But such a compromise dates from before the implementation of a universal standard for text known as Unicode, and Perseus now offers Unicode display options in addition to its earlier solutions. For more information about Unicode, see http://www.unicode.org/. Until everybody’s software supports Unicode, you might also consider a graphical solution, presenting letters with macrons as in-line images—a method used extensively by our journals division. Finally, if you have the option of posting your text as PDF page images, you shouldn’t have any problem displaying macrons, though you will lose some of the functionality of the HTML environment.
