Re: Em Dash & Bullets

Lauren:

>I continued
> to press 151, but nothing appeared.
> What did I miss?

Sounds like your Caps Lock or Scroll Lock may be "On".

The method is to hold down the Alt key while typing 0151.
However, if either the Caps or Scroll lock is "depressed", (Valium won't
help), you may get beeped and/or need to use the Key Pad as Jim mentioned.
Also--to double check--we are talking about ZERO-one-five-one. (No "Oh"s
allowed)

This Alt+0151 business only holds true if you are using a WYSIWYG editor,
like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. In this case, both of them will (usually?)
automatically change it to:
&#151-- just like the page that Fuzzy mentioned. If it appears in the raw
text of the page as an em dash, only Windows, (and a few others), will
display it correctly.

And--as Fuzzy qualified in his suggestion--viewers must still be using the
"right" character set.

Speaking of which--when our toy airplane club was e-mailing newsletters, we
found that our old friend AOL was messing up em dashes in HTML e-mail. For
all I know, their proprietary "browser" may be doing the same in web pages.

Have to agree with Tamara, a small GIF is the most fool proof.

I don't use them myself as there must be several hundred em dashes in each
one of my novels. Going through 30 odd chapters and 130,000 words or so, is
a lot of searching and replacing for a VERY small percentage of viewers.

And Hey!!-- What happens to a GIF if the viewer changes the font size
default in their browser??

As I have stated many times, there is hardly a subject in HTML work that is
not riddled with this sort of "what ifs". And life is all too short ...

Besides--If an ugly old man like myself can appear "downtown" without a
tie--escorting a "lady" who's shirt tail is hanging out and her hair, six
months in need of comb and brush--And--If an English teacher can send a note
home with a grandson, deploring his lack of double spacing--and--manage to
confuse the use of "presently" where the phrase "at present" was intended
and employ "contact" as a verb--all in two short paragraphs ....

Somehow--I don't think a messed up em dash is going to shock the world all
that much???

Best wishes
Ted Temer
Temercraft Designs Redding, CA
temer(at)c-zone.net
www.temercraft.com/novels/
www.newsredding.com/
www.ramac-rc.org/


> Ted,
>
> Thanks... I was trying the Alt+0151 method last night in my frenzy to get
it
> right (which never happened), but my computer would not print the
character.
> Held down Alt, pressed "0" and the computer made a ping sound, I continued
> to press 151, but nothing appeared.
> What did I miss? Hey... have you tried Fuzzy's suggestion?
>
> Thanks,
> Lauren
>

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