How to use these symbols

The first thing I'll say is that I only ever really wrote these pages for my own (and a few colleagues') use. They are therefore not optimised for general external access. Nor are they particularly user friendly, but I hope they may still be of some use.

The gif characters

First you will have to download the gifs onto your own machine. In principle it is possible to link directly to my copies, but please do not. They should take up very little of your disk space. A single file containing all the greek alphabet is available from the greek page. I have yet to bundle up the other symbols gifs, so you'll have to get them one at a time.

Alongside each symbol is the HTML command I use to include that gif into the text. You should be able to simply copy that line into your document. The only change you may require is in the SRC="" command. This specifies the location of the gif on your computer. If you have not used the same filenames as me, it will need to be changed. Note also that I use a UNIX based machine, so the path separator character is /. If you are on a DOS or Windows machine, you would be using \ instead. (I have no idea what is the equivalent on a MAC!) Also because of my using UNIX, a few of the filenames are longer than eight characters. You will have to rename them for a DOS machine. Sorry.

Special characters (ISO character codes)

To use these, you do not need to download any extra files. They should be displayed by your browser on its own. To include them in the text, all you need is the appropriate magic number with &# before it and ; after. I have included a few examples of the ones I find most useful in my work.

Also given are alternative names for some of the symbols. These are much easier to remember, but be warned; they do not work on all browsers. For example, in Netscape & and & will have the same effect. This will not always be so though.

I have also included an ASCII table. I have not checked them all, but for the most part this is the same as the ISO character codes. I am afraid this link is not written in HTML. It is just a plain text file and I know that some people have been unable to load it into their browser. I'm sorry, but I have rather too much work to do, to be setting a full ASCII table in HTML. I'm sure someone out there has done it already though.


Robert J. Smith, rjs@astro.livjm.ac.uk
Last modified: Tue Jul 14 13:37:17 EST 1998