User:Srjfoo/drafts

Ligatures and Characters with Diacritical Marks

In some projects, you will find characters with special marks either above or below the basic Latin A...Z letter. These are called diacritical marks, and indicate a special pronunciation for this character. A ligature is a character consisting of two or more characters joined together. The most common ligatures, and the only ones Distributed Proofreaders has available in its character suites, are the ae and oe ligatures æ/Æ and œ/Œ.

If these ligatures and characters with diacritical marks are on a scanned page, but not in that project's character suite(s) as displayed in the character picker in the proofreading interface, and instructions are not given in the Project Comments, please contact the Project Manager by posting in the project discussion or by sending them a Private Message, and ask how they want the characters to be proofread.

The project manager may ask you to indicate such characters in the text by using bracket notation, for example: ă which is represented as: [)a] for a breve (the u-shaped accent) above an a, or [a)] for a breve below. Be sure to include the square brackets ([ ]). In the rare case in which a diacritic is over two letters, include both letters in the brackets.

When you type the bracket notation in the correct order from left to right for a diacritical character in the proofreading interface, the system will convert your bracket notation into the actual character, provided that diacritical character is available in the character suite for that project, and that the closing bracket is the last character typed for that group. This works for the ae and oe ligatures as well as for characters with diacriticals. For example, if you type [:o] or [ae] in the proofreading interface, the entire [:o] or [ae] will turn into ö or æ when you type the closing square bracket ].

In the final processing of the project, the post-processor will replace any remaining "square bracketed" diacritical characters that remain in the text with whatever symbol works best for the final version of the text submitted to Project Gutenberg.

In the table below, the "x" represents a letter with a diacritical mark. When proofreading, use the actual character from the text, not the x shown in the examples.

Proofreading Symbols for Diacritical Marks
diacritical mark	sample	above	below
macron (straight line)	¯	[=x]	[x=]
2 dots (dieresis, umlaut)	¨	[:x]	[x:]
1 dot	·	[.x]	[x.]
grave accent	`	[`x]	[x`]
acute accent (aigu)	´	['x]	[x']
circumflex	ˆ	[^x]	[x^]
caron (v-shaped symbol)	∨	[vx]	[xv]
breve (u-shaped symbol)	∪	[)x]	[x)]
inverted breve (inverted u-shaped symbol)	̑	[(x]	[x(]
tilde	˜	[~x]	[x~]
cedilla	¸		[x,]
ring	̊	[*x]	[x*]