Special Characters

Sec­tion 11.12 of the The Chica­go Man­u­al of Style’s six­teenth edi­tion rec­om­mends includ­ing a list of spe­cial char­ac­ters at the end of any man­u­script (a spe­cial char­ac­ter gen­er­al­ly being any­thing not found on a stan­dard key­board). Because I’m lazy I want some­thing to do the work for me so I don’t have to track what char­ac­ters I’m using through revi­sions. Let’s make LaTeX track the spe­cial char­ac­ters we use.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Spe­cial Char­ac­ters”

Naming Characters (and Places, Groups, Gods…)

I’m awful with names. Actu­al­ly that under­sells how bad I am. I’m the kind of per­son who likes things to be pre­cise and cor­rect from the begin­ning (engi­neer­ing hat) so I don’t even like hav­ing place­hold­ers and call­ing my char­ac­ters Bob, Janet, and Tony. I’ve tried, real­ly, but I keep fid­get­ing and will spend hours try­ing to come up with the per­fect name. Plus even if I some­how move on find/replace can only do so much. If I screw up and talk about how Bbo and Tony are try­ing to one-up each oth­er to take Janet on a date we all know what’s going to happen.

The solu­tion: place­hold­ers. Yeah, even though I hate them they’re still the best option. Let’s look at a prac­ti­cal example.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Nam­ing Char­ac­ters (and Places, Groups, Gods…)”