Entering Diacritics and Special Characters

Diacritics and special characters can be input or changed when you edit a record.

Sierra encodes records with Unicode. In Sierra, Unicode values are stored within braces and prefixed with a 'u'.

To display the Unicode values of special characters in a record, open the record in View or Edit mode and choose View | Show Codes from the menu bar.

Unicode is an international standard for representing character sets from hundreds of languages with multi-byte encoding. Every character included in the Unicode set is assigned a unique two- or three-byte code. The related UTF8 standard is a data transmission encoding scheme that packs the multi-byte codes used for storage of Unicode characters into a variable-length representation suitable for transmission via the Internet.

During record indexing, the system substitutes standard characters for special ones. See Advanced Word Search Syntax and The Keyword Index: Title Sort Keys.

You can transliterate Chinese characters to Roman alphabet characters in a bibliographic record. See Romanizing Chinese Bibliographic Records for more information.

Font Sets and Invalid Characters

If a character appears as a box in the Character Map, your PC is not set up for the corresponding font or character set. If you know what the character is, you can select and insert it. The character will appear on PCs that are set up for the font/character set.

If a character is not supported or is invalid, it appears in the application background color. Invalid characters are not valid for input and are not selectable.

You insert diacritics and special characters into records by using the Character Map. To insert a diacritic or special character:

  1. While in a record, a dialog box, or anywhere you can enter text, choose Tools | Character Map.
  2. Choose a character set from the Code Chart drop down menu.
  3. Place the cursor where you want to enter the character.
  4. Choose a character in the Character Map.
  5. Choose Insert.
  6. Choose Close to close the Character Map.
As an alternative to choosing a character from the Character Map with your mouse, you can type the character's Unicode value into the text box. The character's Unicode value can be determined from its row and column in the Character Map. Unicode values must be enclosed in braces and preceded with a 'u'. For example, if the character is in row "00a" and column "3", its Unicode value is 00a3. Enclosing the Unicode value in braces and preceding it with a 'u' yields {u00a3}. Enter {00a3} in the text box.