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If you have a color printer, you should print this document with the background colors enabled for your printer. Also, you should probably print this with the fonts rendered at their smallest possible size.
Characters in pink should always be expressed with the HTML equivalents (", <, etc.) when you want those characters to appear to web users—because these characters are primarily for creating HTML. So, if you want the user to see " & < and > you should use the substitutions shown above, in the yellow box.
The gray boxes and characters represent typical keyboard characters using a QWERTY keyboard. You don't have to provide any special substitutes for them. The exceptions are the gray boxes beyond character 126 (including characters 127, 129, 141, 143, 144, 157, and 173). The rules say: You should not use these characters. However, I have used them with impunity. So, use at your own risk.
The blue boxes represent characters that are present in the Windows character set, but which vary on other platforms, such as with Macintosh browsers, Unix browsers, and so on. On some platforms, these are reserved as "control characters," not intended for display of information. However, I have not found many instances where they have actually caused problems with the latest crop of browsers. If you do need to use any of the characters in blue, don't use the character code, use the easy to remember character entity instead (for instance, use • instead of •). For a more complete explanation of this problem, see: "On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML." Please note that the special Euro (€) character may not be present in all typefaces, and some viewers may not see it.
HTML is designed to be flexible, and can actually support a wider variety of characters than actually shown above—such as symbols, mathematical symbols, Greek and Hebrew letters, and international characters. (See http://www.natural-innovations.com/boo/doc-charset.html.) However the full international character set is not supported by every web browser or by the fonts installed on most computers. So, I am showing you only the 255 character-set available the typical web surfer. Wherever possible, limit your usage to the characters shown here.
This table was hand-created by Rich Tatum based on the TypeRodent Word for Windows macro, found elsewhere on this site. The HTML ANSI equivalents are based on the official World Wide Web Consortium documentation found at the W3C website, here: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.html.
Special thanks to buddy, colleague, and coworker Clay Anderson (aka: "Bonanza") for the javascript hack allowing you to change fonts in this table. Wahoo! (10/19/2000).
For more information regarding character sets, view the following:
The Web Design Group's character tutorial:
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/
Jukka Korpela's comprehensive work, A tutorial on character code issues:
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/chars.html
On the use of some MS Windows characters in HTML:
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/www/windows-chars.html
The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes:
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/latin1/
The HTML Compendium of Character Entities:
http://www.htmlcompendium.org/7entity.htm
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