Does anyone know a way of getting a radical dot symbol into HTML - at the moment I'm stuck with using the degree symbol (ie °). I'm also having problems with equation arrows, is ---> really the best HTML can cope with?
I guess this just shows how non-ideal the current version of HTML is for scientists (I know HTML3 is better, but many browsers still aren't compatible). Ironic, really, given the Web's origins!
This is a manifestation of the character set problem. Someone has estimated that across chemistry as a whole, some 3000 "special" characters have been used over the years. Solving this (given some of the character sets are proprietary and cannot be assumed resident on a user's machine) is a non trivial problem. The other problem is that most character sets are in fact 8-bit encoded, ie at most 256 characters can be addressed. The Unicode system of 16-bit encoding will address that problem, but appears to be a long way away from being adopted on PCs. Hence we have to rely on proprietary solutions. I believe that Microsoft will be using "TrueDoc" fonts in V 3.0 of Internet Explorer which will almost certainly give us a much larger selection of special characters, but whether that represents a solution is anyone's guess. If someone has more informatio about "TrueDoc" do let us know!! Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ (Eudora Pro 3.0) ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)