• Processing (Info)

  • Accented Characters in Citations and Place Names

    The names of the minor planets, their citations and the names of observatory sites include words from many different languages. Accented characters are quite common in these foreign words. The HTML representations of the naming citations attempt to properly display these accented characters--the level of success depends primarily on the new-ness of your browser.

    Here are some examples of accented characters so you can see how your browser copes with them.

    • á : letter "a" with acute accent
    • è : letter "e" with grave accent
    • í : letter "i" with acute accent
    • ö : letter "o" with umlaut
    • â : letter "a" with circumflex
    • ñ : letter "n" with tilde
    • ç : letter "c" with cedilla
    • ř : letter "r" with hacek
    • α : Greek lowercase alpha
    • ľ : letter "l" with hacek
    • Š : letter "S" with hacek
    The representations in the list above should match those in the image below:

    Graphic of accented characters above

    Note that the two examples on the second line of the image are particularly troublesome for current browsers.

    Apparently, the preferred form for displaying the l-hacek and t-hacek is to use the apostrophe form, which is how those characters are defined in the UTF-8 character set. The reasons for this preference are not clear, as the hacek (caron) is used on the T and L forms. We would prefer to use the form illustrated in the graphic, but these characters do not appear to be defined in the UTF-8 character set.


    The stated recent versions of the following browsers are known to display all these accented characters correctly (noting that the above-mentioned hacek'ed characters are displayed using the apostrophe form):

    • Firefox 1.5.0.2
    • Netscape 8.0.3.3
    • IE 6.0
    Older versions of these browsers may or may not display all these characters propely. Note that no extensive testing of earlier versions has been performed.

    Lynx 2.6 displays all but the hacek-ed and Greek characters correctly.