defining non english characters in an english epub

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Greg Anos

It shows you how to go into the character map in windows (I have virtual machines for both Win 7 and XP. Both based on legitimate retail copies I own.). The map has a very useful help screen.

LibreOffice's Insert Special Character screen is also very good.

It's even better than the default Windows Character Map, because it lets you search.

Side Note: If working on EPUB, Calibre Editor's special character dialog is equally as fantastic.

If on Windows, you can also use BabelMap. It's pretty much a souped up Character Map, allows you to search fonts, find all Unicode characters, create your own buffers, etc. etc.

Originally Posted by Greg Anos

I'm keeping a second .doc document with the characters I need (and commonly used words) and do a scrape and paste.

Yep, that's an okay way to do it too.

In books I work on, I only run across the rare accent, so I have a few of those Wikipedia pages open for exactly what I need. (Like their Greek alphabet + Greek diacritics pages are very well organized.)

I also use FileFormat.info's fantastic "Unicode Character Search".

Originally Posted by Greg Anos

RTF - How do you remove the hard-coded vertical line spacing? I have had the same problem with optiscan and Finereader 9 as I have with my current "junk" setup.

Unsure what you mean. Can you post a sample document?

It should be as easy as adjusting the default paragraph's Style.

You do know all about Styles... right?

On how to apply Styles, check out the videos I posted in:

"MS Word vs Open Office Word"

On why Styles are so important, read Posts #46+ in:

"eBook Formatting in Sigil"

Originally Posted by Jellby

Actually, the only entities one should really need are &lt; &amp; &gt;, because their characters (< & >) would be XML code otherwise.

Ahhh yes yes, I always forget about those 3 since Sigil/Calibre automatically takes care of all of that.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Actually, the only entities one should really need are &lt; &amp; &gt;, because their characters (< & >) would be XML code otherwise.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Ahhh yes yes, I always forget about those 3 since Sigil/Calibre automatically takes care of all of that.

And lest we forget, HTML5 also supports &quot; and &apos; to round out the 5 permitted named entities.

[Jellby]

Yep, but I don't think those are needed for text, only for attribute values.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Yep, but I don't think those are needed for text, only for attribute values.

Goes back to when I had my ear chewed on by an author who used named entities for his quote marks and damn near everything else and didn't understand why &rsquo;, etc. were now causing errors when they'd been using them for decades without problems.