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All About Characters & Symbols

For some reason, the computer’s favorite things to mistranslate are degree signs. It helps when the author uses the symbol for a degree sign, in Word (for Mac) that is opt-shift-8. It is surprisingly time-consuming when the authors use superscripted or raised zeros or "ohs".

There are two cases where authors often go to too much trouble to "do it right". The first case is that of "stacked" characters. Authors can just superscript the supers and subscript the subs, they do not need to actually stack them in Word. We do the stacking in production, because any Word stacking ends up lost. Whatever you do, please do not use an equation editor to create simple in-line stacks! We have to retype each one of these. The second case of "working too hard" is that of overbars. We create the overbars in production (and not using Word), so each instance of overbars in Word or in an in-line equation box has to be deleted and rekeyed. Authors should simply put a minus/hyphen sign in front (e.g., P-3), or even a note on the first instance to say some like "in all instances of P3, the 3 has an overbar." On the other hand, if it is easier or more comfortable for the authors to continue inserting the overbars, then we will just work it out here.

My final plea is that authors use proper superscripts and subscripts and NOT raised or lowered type!

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