In Joe's thread there is recent discussion about adding "Character Map" to a post, I am intrigued to see if it works in a thread title because some of the other features that you can use in the body of a post (bold / color etc) can't be used by regular members in the title of a thread.

There you go, it works! Post #991 in idle chat has explanation from Bro angst.

Of course worth remembering the first Bro to put a Neon sign out front his business on Nathan Rd in TST stood out a lot more then than he does now...

[ Last edited by  TonyToro at 8-3-2011 16:34 ]

Does this work for osx?  If so, how do I go abouts doing it.

I use OSX but I have to confess I copied and pasted...

i did a google search, apparently there are some widgets for this... gonna give it a shot later.

See these a lot on the Chinese side. TBH, they just clutter up the forum page, and just say, "I need attention!" Which of course is a bit silly really, because it's substance that matters, not the title. Two things can happen... 1) only a few people do it, in which case they look a bit silly in attention seeking, or 2) most people do it and the effect is gone a sea of such.

a bit like the Neon signs on Nathan Rd...

i hope this doesn't go too far--what attracts my attention is much the same as the neon TT mentioned: a name, a district, pix and a good report once you click on that link!

all these special-characters conform to the ASCII standard, which isn't dependent on software, platform or browser. ASCII is the standard that allows Romanized text (and special characters) to be recognized on different devices, including computers.

i haven't found the solid-box yet, but here's a start: fire up TextEdit (standard on all Macs and a handy word-processor i use constantly) and try Edit > Special Characters.

yowza! should be enough there to keep u busy for awhile.

more sophisticated word-processors use other methods to display the non-letter characters. but if they conform to the ASCII-standard, they have a three-number code which some word-procs even display. so if u want to be old-school u can figure out how to type in the codes manually. although T-Edit seems to have an extra section called "Favorites" so u can probably tweak it the way u want it. note that NON-ASCII-compliant codes (like MS Word's vile "Smart" apostrophes, dashes, and "curly quotes" will not display properly, which is why you see those junk-characters all over the Internet. now you know. Notepad will cleanse text if you're forced to use Windows.

there's a great explanation at:

http://www.asciitable.com/

"ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical representation of a character such as 'a' or '@' or an action of some sort. ASCII was developed a long time ago and...[is]... the raw format that any computer can understand."

and hey whaddaya know, there's your solid-box in the "Extended ASCII Codes": code number 219.

hope this helps.

JtB

Not sure that it'll be that much of common knowledge that everyone will start doing it, but this thread title certainly caught my attention straight away, it has to be said.