The occasional scrivener

Unicode characters

I’m a bit torn about how to handle the “meta-strip” below each post, the one containing the posting date, permalink, and so on. The octothorpe (#) is almost universal for denoting permalinks. Some people have recommended the ‘paragraph sign’ or pilcrow (¶) instead, but I’m not happy with that in Verdana. I’m going to try with the ‘N-ary product operator’ (∏, ampersand notation: ∏). The big Pi suggests P as in permalink, and also the kind of Grecian edifice that stands the tests of time.

The small pi is included here for possible future use: π (π).

I got the ampersand codes for above from this page, which weirdly is a subset of a Jane Austen-oriented site.

The vertical bars separating the fields was getting too bold, so I’ve replaced them with non-breaking spaces. I’m looking for a good, unobstrusive character to separate the fields. Maybe I’ll just style the bars differently.

Update Digging around on Alan Wood’s Unicode resource site, I found the following interesting candidate for permalink characters:

• hash/octothorpe: # #
• pilcrow: ¶ ¶ (¶)
• n-ary product: ∏ ∏ (∏)
• small letter pi: π π (π)
• lozenge: ◊ ◊ (◊)
• nabla: ∇ ∇ (∇)
• reference mark: ※ ※ (※)
• double-struck capital P: ℙ ℙ (ℙ)
• strictly equivalent to: ≣ ≣ (≣)
• place of interest sign: ⌘ ⌘ (⌘)
• OCR belt buckle: ⑄ ⑄ (⑄)
• OCR fork: ⑂ ⑂ (⑂)
• Black star: ★ ★ (★)

Update 2006-02-02: some more chars I want to mess around with:

• Latin cross: ✝ ✝ (✝)
• open center black star: ✫ ✫ (✫)
• eight spoked asterisk ✳ (✳)
• eight pointed black star ✴ (✴)

Updated on Monday, 2024-11-08. Posted at 14:11, in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
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