ISO Latin-1 Character and Entity References

Some characters are difficult to represent in web pages. The biggest problems are the "<" and ">" signs, which, if you simply type them into your text, will be interpreted by browsers as a tag! To solve this problem you can specify any character by putting an ampersand followed by either (1) a hash followed by the character's decimal ASCII code or (2) the character's HTML entity name. Both of these options should be ended with a semicolon.

For example, to specify the "copyright" sign, put © into your HTML code. You could put © instead, but it's better to put © - it works with more browsers. You can test your browser by looking at the columns "Character Reference", which uses the &#nnn; method, and the column "Entity Reference" which uses the &entity; method.

The "&" and """ signs often don't pose problems for browsers... but they do sometimes! So it's good practice to specify them as & and ".

The following table lists The ISO Latin-1 entities defined as part of HTML. These entites are supported by almost all browsers, and are defined as part of the ISO Latin-1 character set.

NOTE -- There is a useful Table Key at the bottom of this document, plus a note about Apostrophes that may be helpful for HTML authors.

Table Key/Description

• Column 1 defines the decimal position of the character in the Unicode character set.
• Column 2 defines the position of the character in the Unicode character set, but in hexadecimal notation.
• Column 3 contains an SGML decimal character reference for the character (i.e., &#xxx;, where xxx is the decimal character code). If the character is rendered correctly, then your browser supports this character reference and has a font that can generate the required symbol. If you see a "box" or question mark, then your browser probably understands the character reference, but does not have an appropriate font for displaying it.
• Column 4 gives the entity name by which the character can be identified.
• Column 5 contains an actual entity reference, of the form &name;, where name is the name of the entity -- for example, &cent;. If the character is rendered correctly, then your browser supports this entity reference and has a font that can generate the required symbol. If you see a "box" or question mark, then your browser probably understands the character reference, but does not have an appropriate font for displaying it. If you simply see the literal entity string (e.g., &Epsilon;), then your browser does not understand the entity name.
• Column 6 contains a short, simple description of the character.
• Column 7 lists the ISO standard (if any) that originally defined this entity name.

Apostrophe Hell & How To Avoid It

Watch out for apostrophe (or single quote) marks. The "straight" apostrophe works in HTML, as does the backquote. These are normal ASCII characters, with decimal values 039 for apostrophe and 096 for backquote.

However, some text processors have a feature called "smart quotes" by which the program "helps" you by automatically pairing up apostrophes and changing them into angled open and close quote marks outside the normal ASCII character range. To avoid this annoyance, turn OFF smart quotes.

If it's impossible to do this, or if you just delight in being super systematic (perhaps you're typing in shell commands where the distiction between an apostrophe and a backquote is crucial) then instead of typing in the characters and peering at the screen to confirm that they're still what you think they are, you can specify their decimal character codes or (in one case) an entity reference. What you'll have just realised is that actually you can specify any normal, typeable ASCII character with its decimal character code - though usually there's no point when you can just type the letter.