Special Characters

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Inserting Special Characters with the Character Palette

When you are in Story Editor or edit contents mode, you will see these choices in the Insert menu. This allows to insert foreign language accented characters, special symbols not found on the keyboard, typographic symbols (such as typographic quotation marks, em dash, en dash, variably sized spaces, for example), and ligatures.

Selecting Insert > Glyphs brings up the dialog you see here, containing all available characters in your font. Which font will be displayed, depends on the formatting of the text in which the cursor placed, but you can select another font from the drop-down list in the upper left. Since the characters are displayed in your chosen font, if you see the character here, it should display on the page, which may or may not be true in Story Editor, depending on its display font.

On the upper right you can choose if you want to display all glyphs of a font or subsets like “Basic Latin” or “Ligatures”.

Each time you click on a glyph in the palette, it will be added to the grey field at the bottom. Thus, you can insert more than one glyph at once. To insert the selected glyph or glyphs at the cursor position in a Text Frame, click “Insert”, and to clear the field, click “Clear”.

You will note that the palette displays the Unicode string for each glyph. If you know this string, you can insert it directly in the field labeled “Code”. That can be a big time saver, if you're working with huge fonts that contain hundreds of glyphs.

Inserting Selected Special Characters and Formatting from the Insert Menu

The Insert menu offers some submenus that can be used to insert selected special characters and special formatting. Let's have a look at these submenus and their entries, one by one.

Character

Image:Spc1.png

Of the first three entries only “Non Breaking Dash” needs an explanation, since "Page Number" and "Smart Hyphen" are already explained in the “Page Numbering” and “Hyphenation” sections. A non breaking dash is a dash that won't be accepted as a hyphen. Imagine you write “A–Z”. You surely won't want a line break after A–, and therefore you add a non breaking dash.

The “Copyright”, “Registered Trademark” and “Trademark” entries don't need an explanation either, as their use is widespread. The following entries, however, might be less familiar.

  • Solidus: The Solidus looks like a slash, but it isn't the same. It's used to denote the British currency Shillings and also in Mathematics to typeset fractions like 1/5.
  • Bullet: The Bullet point is used for unnumbered lists.
  • Middle Dot: The Middle Dot can be used as a more reluctant version of a Bullet Point, but it can also replace a comma in continuous texts when used for enumerations. It can also be used as a symbol for multiplications in mathematical formulas.
  • Em Dash: The em dash is mostly used in English typography. It represents a dash with the width of the letter "M" (uppercase). It can be used to typographically replace parentheses or parenthetical commas. The general recommendation is to use the em dash without spaces, like in this example: "all people—young and old, black and white—celebrated". However, this recommendation cannot be generalized, as many typographers use the em dash with Hair Spaces on both sides of the dash. Even in English typography, though, the use of the em dash is on the decline. Instead, anglo-saxon printers and tyopgraphers use the en dash plus regular spacing more and more.Outside the English typography the em dash is sometimes used as a replacement for double zero decimal places. For instance, 2.00 EUR can be represented by 2.— EUR. The em dash is also used as a replacement for the quotation dash (see below).
  • En Dash: The en dash is a dash with the width of the letter "n" (lowercase) in a given font. It's smaller than an em dash or a quotation dash, but wider than a hyphen, a minus or a figure dash. The en dash is used for two purposes: First, it indicates a range between numbers or dates (12–14 °C). In this case, no space is added between the two values and the dash. The second use case is the same as the em dash, namely to replace parentheses or commas, but in contrast to the latter, it is used with spaces on both sides.
  • Figure Dash: The figure dash isn't available in many fonts. It's a dash that represents the width of a digit in Monospace fonts. It can be replaced by a hyphen or a minus almost all of the time.
  • Quotation Dash: Just like the figure dash, the quotation dash is rarely available in most fonts. It is used to indicate quotations, just like quotation marks. It can easily be replaced by an em dash, because even trained eyes won't notice the the difference.


Quotes Image:Spc2.png

There are many kinds of marks to denote quotations, some language-specific. In English, the proper typographic quotation marks will not be obtained directly from the keyboard, so here you have the ability to precisely choose the correct mark for your purpose.

  • Apostrophe: This actually not a typographic apostrophe, but a typewriter apostrophe. You shouldn't use it, unless you are trying to use it in connection with the “Straight Double Quote” in mathematics or to denote inches, like in: 5'45". Another use case is the emulation of typewriters. The “Apostrophe” name is derived from Unicode naming standards.
  • Straight Double: The remarks made above also apply to the “Straight Double”. Don't use it for quotes!
  • Single Left: This name actually refers to English quotation marks. In English typography (and some others who adopted the English model), the single left quote is a comma, both horizontally and vertically mirrored, then used in superscript style. To describe the different uses of so-called curly quotes, typographers use the ciphers 6 and 9. The English single left quote is a 6-comma in superscript style.
  • Single Right: Another English quotation mark. It is a (9-)comma in superscript style.
  • Double Left: Is the double version of the English left quotation mark.
  • Double Right: Is the double version of the English right quotation mark.
  • Low Single Comma: This is the standard left single quote in German and Austrian German, Danish and in many Central European typographies.
  • Low Double Comma: This is the standard left double quote in German and Austrian German, Danish and in many Central European typographies.

An additional note about “curly quotes”: Afrikaans, Dutch, Polish, Finnish and Swedish use a mix of both systems: Low commas are left quotes, and the English double right mark is used for right quotation marks. In Greek it's the other way around: Left English quotes on the left and low single commas on the right.

  • Single Left Guillemet: This is the standard left single quote in Spanish, Portuguese, most Eastern European countries and in Switzerland. It's also the standard in French, but with an additional space between guillemet and text.
  • Single Right Guillemet: This is the standard right single quote in Spanish, Portuguese, most Eastern European countries and in Switzerland. It's also the standard in French, but with an additional space between guillemet and text.
  • Double Left Guillemet: This is the standard left double quote in Spanish, Portuguese, most Eastern European countries and in Switzerland. It's also the standard in French, but with an additional space between guillemets and text.
  • Double Right Guillemet: This is the standard double right quote in Spanish, Portuguese, most Eastern European countries and in Switzerland. It's also the standard in French, but with an additional space between guillemets and text.

An additional note about Guillemets: In German and Austrian German and many Central European countries, guillemets are also frequently used as quotation marks, especially in books. They are, however used reversed, ie. a “left” Guillemet is a right quotation mark and the other way around.

  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) use special corner brackets as quotation marks. These are only available in Asian font files

If your special character fails to display, this most often means that it is not available in your chosen font. Just because it shows in Story Editor does not mean it will show on the page -- that only means it exists for Story Editor's display font.

Spaces and Breaks Image:Spc3.png

These are special size and purpose spaces. The first on the list, “Non Breaking Space”, is actually a normal space with a particular behavior. One may have, for example, a couple of words like “Dr. Smith”, so you would want a nonbreaking space between the two words so they do not get separated at a line break.

The rest of the upper section shows many different sized spaces which can be used. They will only be available if your chosen font includes them:

  • En Space: Has the width of the letter “n” (lowercase) in the font.
  • Em Space: Has the width of the letter “M” (uppercase) in the font. Thin Space: Has the width of one fifth (sometimes one sixth) of the letter “M” (uppercase).
  • Thick Space: Has the width of one third of the letter “M” (uppercase).
  • Mid Space: Has the width of one fourth of the letter “M” (uppercase).
  • Hair Space: Is the thinnest possible space: 0.5 point.

The lower section first shows the ability to force a line break without creating a new paragraph – “New Line”. The keyboard shortcut may not work in the Story Editor, however. A “Frame Break” will apply when you have linked frames – use this to force a break to the next frame in the linkage. Similarly, in a frame where there is more than one column, “Column Break” forces text to the next column.

Ligatures

Image:Spc4.png

Image:Ligatures.png

Ligatures are special characters, representing the combination of two (or more) characters, such as “fi” and “fl” as you see here – they are not two characters close together, but one glyph. They must be present in your chosen font to be used. The OpenType format (OTF) provides some features for automatic replacement of two letters by the appropriate ligature. However, Scribus 1.3.3.x doesn't support them yet. To replace two letters with an appropriate ligature, you can use the “Search and Replace” feature described above, but be careful! The replacement of two letters may not always be correct. Therefore, you have to check each case. For instance, replacing “cufflink” with "cuf-fl-ink" (to describe the effect of using a ligature) would be dead wrong.

Entering Unicode Values Directly Into a Text Frame

While you are in Edit Contents of Frame mode in the main screen, or in the Story Editor, you can press F12, then the 4-digit Unicode string for a character and it will be entered into the frame. This is in hexadecimal format, so digit choices are 0 to f, and you will find these codes underneath the Glyph in the Glyphs palette. Example: press F12, then "00a9" for the Copyright symbol: ©.

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