options for the user to enter special characters

What are the options for the user to enter special characters like trademark or copyright without using visual formatting in the DCT?
HTML? Image? what else?
which one is the recommended one, painless and easy to implement?

Any thoughts on this would be very helpful

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Adam Stoller

What are the options for the user to enter special characters like trademark or copyright without using visual formatting in the DCT?
HTML? Image? what else?
which one is the recommended one, painless and easy to implement?

Any thoughts on this would be very helpful

HTML / entities are generally best - but not very "user-friendly"
Inventing your own markup which FormAPI or your PT can change to the correct markup is "user-friendly" but not necessarily "great"

nipper

What are the options for the user to enter special characters like trademark or copyright without using visual formatting in the DCT?
HTML? Image? what else?
which one is the recommended one, painless and easy to implement?

Any thoughts on this would be very helpful

Now, if your DCRs and TPL are set properly you can cut&paste into a text window UTF8 special characters. So if someone has a trademark symbol they can use then that will work.

I am doing that for some international sites.

Finally you need to make certain the encoding is set correctly, to allow this. There are some earlier threads on it that I started a couple weeks ago. Here is one that will help, read about the BOM....
http://devnet.interwoven.com/forums_vb/showthread.php?t=23499&forumid=11

Andy

moonkhanna

I implemented something similar to Andy's scenario. All goes fine if you make sure things are UTF-8 everywhere..

In case, you plan to use another encoding, you can do so as well, but you will need to make sure that your DCRs save content in that encoding... search on IWOV support site for teh respective article

moonkhanna

A reading of the above mentioned post by Andy as well as the IWOV templating manual explanation of encoding will help you understand encodings and how to handle special characters better

sasikumarg

Hi santosh,

You can use the above mentioned to enter special characters in the DCT.

You can refer the attached sample file to handle encoding

Sasi

cesarecastro

Using UTF 8 encoding is a must if you want compatibility across systems and plan to re-purpose your content for things other then web content publishing. If you are just worry special characters just stick with UTF-8, and if you are also dealing with styling in your content (which is almost never a good thing) then do as Ghotti mentions and start thinking about creating your own markup.

Cutting and Pasting UTF-8 encoded characters would achieve your requirement (as nipper mentions) but you can make it easier on your users. Maybe having a special characters button on your form that opens up a pop up window where a user can select from a set of special characters (UTF8 encoded of course). Once selected the special character would appear on the form element.