How do we do with "special characters" like non-breaking spaces, long hyphens etc...?

mmoole

Hello,

i just stumpled across the github repository since a long time ago, and found out that most styles have been changed to include special characters like non-breaking spaces or long hyphens etc. "directly" - that is they are there as charachters and not as html formatting kind of style (whats the name of that?) like & #160; for example.

For example in the harvard7de style I used that a lot, and now they are changed - but still there.
Well, on one hand i don't really bother how to do that because i have not really a qualified opinion about that by myself...
on the other hand i wonder if there is a guideline for this kind of things? Is there a kind of preferred practice?

greetings
mmoole

adamsmith

I'm pretty sure the preferred practice is still to use the character encoding when in doubt, though most regular symbols (like em dash or nbsp) should work either way.
& <> " ' always need to be encoded as &amp ; &lt ; etc., though.

dstillman

As long as you're editing the file as UTF-8, there shouldn't really be any need to use entities for anything other than the XML reserved characters (and really you don't need to use an entity for ' as long as you use double-quotes consistently) and special space characters such as &#160; that are clearer to read as entities.

mmoole

OK, thats great! many thanks :-)