WYSIWYG

This is lengthy, but there is a hint at the bottom.

The ♦ symbol is one that doesn't print (for me) direct from the web. It will print if I paste into Word first - but I'd suggest another marker.

If I copy your first post (29-Oct-01 - 12:09 PM) and paste it into Word, I can search and find the little dots.

If you open "Find" in Word, Make sure "NumLock" is turned on, and Hold Down ALT while you type "0183" on the Number Pad, you should see the little dot appear in the "Find What" box. If you click "Find Next" Word should find your little dots.

Middle-Dot, ASCII character Number 183, html code · - Word can find this one in your document.

Problem ? - you are using a portable and don't have a separate Number Pad?

On most portables, the "Number Pad" is buried in the main keyboard. You turn it on using the NumLock key, which is usually somewhere at the far top right of the keyboard. Usually, the NumLock and ScrolLock are combined on one key, so you get ScrollLock if you just press the key, and NumLock if you hold down the SHIFT while pressing the key. (That's how mine works, but ????)

In Word, try holding SHIFT while you press the NUMLOCK/SCROLL-LK key. You should see some sort of indication on the status display, probably looking like a little padlock. Try typing "jkl" and if the screen shows "123" you're in NumLock mode. Now, in NUMLOCK mode, type "mj8l" and 0183 should show on the screen. If that works, hold down the ALT key while you type "mj8l" and the little middle-dot should appear on the screen.

Your portable should have little numbers on the front of the keys, so you don't have to guess which ones to use.

You can enter any character whose "number value" is anything up to 255 this way. For example, in NUMLOCK, with ALT held down, typing 065 should give you the letter "A".

ON A PORTABLE: DON'T FORGET TO TURN NUMLOCK OFF before you start typing something else.

My suspicion is that, in your original document, you went to the Symbol font and selected a great big fat "bullet." Unfortunately, without additional coding, all that got to the html document was:

"the character whose numerical value is 183."

In most normal text fonts, that character is the middle-dot, so that's what we saw.

Most text fonts have a perfectly acceptable bullet, but it's number value is 149.

You can put a good bullet into a Word document by:
NumLock ON
Hold down ALT
Type 0149 - or "mju9" if you're on a portable.

In Word, before pasting to this post (watch it mess with me): • • •

You can "code" the text bullet in an html post as "•" although it should come across okay if you just "type" it with the ALT-NUMPAD method. (Note: Word sometimes gets confused if you don't start with the leading zero.)


If you wanted to change the middle-dots in your original post to "text bullets" you should be able - in Word - to do a "Find and Replace" with the middle-dot in the "Find" box and the "text bullet" in the "Replace With" box.

Word offers another option:

You can enter the characters in the search/replace boxes with the ALT-NUMPAD method, or you can just type in "^0nnn". Word recognizes this as "find a character whose ASCII/ANSI number value is 'nnn'". (Note again, that the first character after the caret must be a zero, and this only works up to 255 for the number.)

If you ask Word to find ^0183 it should find your middle dots. If you ask Word to replace them with ^0149 you should end up with bullets.

HTML provides names for a couple of hundred characters, to make them easier to remember. These names are defined in the HTML Spec(s), but you should remember that they are just a shorthand. The characters are "defined" elsewhere by a "number value."

The little dot that you got in your first post has the html shorthand "name" · and has number value 183.

The official html "bullet," which you can code as • has number value 8226. You can also "code" it as • or by the "same number in hex" as •. Unfortunately, if you copy this character from a web page, Word doesn't "recognize" it very well. If it copies and pastes with its "real" number value, there is no easy way to "find" it in Word, and it appears(?) that in some cases, Word may substitute another "number value."

I'm still trying to get my brain around this one.


In your post at 31-Oct-01 - 06:57 PM you apparently used the "List" function - sort of.
You probably noticed that if you copy and paste to Word, the bullet ain't there.

The "List" functions in html apparently work something like the "list" functions in Word. The "bullet" is part of the "format" and is not part of the text so you can't search for the bullet (or number if you use that kind of list) even in Word when you've just created them

Word includes a "numbered list" or "unnumbered list" format as a clicky on the top tool bar, but I have found these troublesome to use.

When you "apply" numbered list formatting, Word uses some sort of arcane hypertext device to indent the list, and add a "symbol" for the numbers (or bullets for unnumbered list). You cannot "select" either the numbers or bullets to edit them. (Try this in Word to see how it doesn't work). You cannot search and find these numbers or bullets, partly because they are "outside" the text - search can't select them either, - and partly because they are "mapped" to "real symbols" - to use "Wordspeak."

With (a copy of) your original document in Word:

Alt-E, E, ^0183, Tab, ^0149, ALT-A (Don't type the commas, of course)

Should replace all the little dots with bigger dots.

John