The Help Centers

Often I have customers ask me how do I get a copyright symbol into my web page?  A quick solution is to simply copy and paste the symbol into a WYSIWYG editor or use the old windows alt-numberpad trick.  But while it may work there is a proper way to get all kinds of unusual characters into your web page. Read More Below...

A quick overview. Computers don’t work with letter but rather numbers and then have a way to convert the numbers to letters.  In the case of a web page the characters you see on the screen are called entities.  Many of them are simply typed in (such as a letter or number)  but others such as the © are a bit more difficult to type in.

There is an alternative way to display characters in a web page and that is through the entity value. The W3C carries a list of entities (the HTML 4.0 and XHTML are the SAME) but it’s a bit difficult so Google for better formated cheat sheets.

To properly use these extended characters you need to be in code or HTML view.  Then type in the value for the character you’re looking for.  © is ©  (it begins with an & and ends with a  ;)  You may notice that some web editors may change this to be the actual character and take out the entity reference.  If this happens see if you can work around the problem by using a different editor, if not you’ll have to play around to see how to save it without having it convert your entity reference to the character itself.