Prettify symbols is an extension in vscode that changes a sequence of characters visually without affecting what the code does. For example, visually changing --> to ⟶ while the coding language uses -->. However, this extension creates seemingly random symbols throughout the file and is no longer maintained. Therefore, that extension is hardly usable at the moment.
Fira Code uses ligatures to do something similar (or the same I am not sure).
What other ways are there to visually change a string of letters ? I am mostly interested in solutions for vscode. As an example I would like to change
~[\Omega]
to
Ω
visually for the user but the code uses the original ~~[\Omega]
[EDIT: I found this github page that adds ligatures to a font. Unfortunately when one creates a ligature where the "hidden" symbol contains many characters and the visible symbol contains a few symbols, a long trace of spaces replacing the missing characters is left behind. The prettify symbols extension mentioned before does not have these spaces. For those that are still interested in making ligatures with the second link, this Fira code font page shows the names of symbols in Fira code. That might be helpful when making a new font from Fira code using the first link of this edit (which is the second link of the question) ]
Related
I have a problem with my VS Code. When trying to modify a file that contains special characters like "á", "ñ", "ó" etc., the special characters are replaced with a question mark. (See image below.)
Although, this can be solved easily from the back of Visual Studio Code, changing the language type to "Windows 1252", because at first it worked for me. But now, even if I change it to that language, the signs are still there.
the files that you opened before you made the changes to the encoding have been auto-overwritten and the original characters were replaced with the unknown-character character
I would like to display list.emptyqm() as list.empty?() in function names for specific language. So, two symbols qm if they are at the end of the function name should be displayed as ? (possibly some unicode symbol looking similar to question mark).
Is that possible in VSCode?
The VSCode already knows that piece of text is string, or function-name/keyword/variable-name (as it highlights it properly), so the ligature should be displayed only if qm are the last
characters of function-name/keyword/variable-name. It shouldn't be displayed in the middle of the function name, like aqma() shouldn't be displayed as a?a().
You seem to misunderstand what a ligature is. A ligature describes how two individual letters can be combined to form a visual pleasing appearance. A ligature never changes the syntax of a text. Hence, converting qm to ? is a completely different thing.
Replacing text in vscode is of course possible, for instance as part of the format command. You can register your own formatter and determine the text edit actions that you want to be applied, including the transformation of these character sequences.
EDIT
While posting the question, character I ask for was shown well to me, but after postig it does not show up anymore. As it does not appear, please look up in original site
EDIT2
I looked for Unicode chars associated with "alien", and found no matching ones. Here is how they are compared side by side:
I found, that some texts inside my database contain character like . I am not sure, how it would rendered with different fonts and environments, so here is the image, how I see it:
I tried to identify it with different ways. For example, when I paste it into Sublime Text, it automatically shows as control character <0x85>. When I tried to identify it in different unicode-detectors (http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html, https://unicode-table.com/en/, https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl), their conclusion is pretty match the same:
Unicode code point character U+0085
UTF-8 encoding c2 85 hexadecimal
194 133 decimal
0302 0205 octal
Unicode character name <control>
Unicode 1.0 character name (deprecated) NEXT LINE (NEL)
https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl
also included this information
HTML encoding …
hexadecimal
…
decimal
which gave me some vague hint, how it was possible, that … become ``. But this is not main problem here.
My question is: how is possible, that control character is shown up like this and what is the actual glyph used to represent it?
I tried to sketch into http://shapecatcher.com/ to identify it but without success. I did not find such a glyph in any Unicode table.
The alien symbol is not a Unicode character; but is in Microsoft's Webdings font, with character code 0x85. Running Start > Run > charmap, then selecting Webdings from the Font drop list, opens this window:
If I click that alien character in the leftmost column, the message Character Code : 0x85 is shown at the bottom of the window.
I can even copy that character from the Character Map and paste it into Microsoft Wordpad:
The WebDings symbols were included in Unicode Release 7: Pictographic symbols (including many emoji), geometric symbols, arrows, and ornaments originating from the Wingdings and Webdings sets. Therefore you would expect the alien symbol to also be in Unicode. However, I don't think the version of Webdings that was used included that alien symbol, since Windows 10 also has a ttf file for Webdings (version 5.01), and it also does not include the alien symbol:
So presumably what originally caught your attention was some text being rendered with an older version of the Webdings font which included that alien symbol.
The glyph is 👽 U+1F47D EXTRATERRESTRIAL ALIEN. I don't know why your system misrenders a control character.
Does unicode have characters in it similar to stuff like the things formed by the <kbd> tag in HTML? I want to use it as part of a game to indicate that the user can press a key to perform a certain action, for example:
Press R to reset, or S to open the settings menu.
Are there characters for that? I don't need anything fancy like ⇧ Shift or Tab ⇆, single-letter keys are plenty. I am looking for something that would work somewhat like the Enclosed Alphanumerics subrange.
If there are characters for that, where could I find a page describing them? All the google searches I tried turned only turned up "unicode character keyboard shortcuts" stuff.
If there are not characters for that, how can I display something like that as part of (or at least in line with) a text string in Processing 2.0.1?
(The rendering referred to is not the default rendering of kbd, which simply shows the content in the system’s default monospace font. But e.g. in StackOverflow pages, a style sheet is used to format kbd so that it looks like a keycap.)
Somewhat surprisingly, there is a Unicode way to create something that looks like a character in a keycap: enter the character, then immediately COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP U+20E3.
Font support to this character is very limited but contains a few free fonts. Unfortunately, none of them is a sans-serif font, and the character to be shown inside should normally appear in such a font – after all, real keycaps contains very simple shapes for characters, without serifs. And generally, a character and an enclosing mark should be taken from the same font; otherwise they might be incompatible. However, it seems that taking the normal character from the sans-serif font (FreeSans) in GNU Freefont and the combining mark from the serif font (FreeSerif) of the same source creates a reasonable presentation:
I’m afraid it won’t work here in text, but I’ll try: A⃣ .
Whether this works depends on the use of suitable fonts, as mentioned, but also on the rendering software. Programs have been rather bad at displaying combining marks, but there has been some improvement. I tested this in Word 2007, where it works OK, and also on web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE) with good results using code like this:
<style>
.cap { font-family: FreeSerif; }
.cap span { font-family: FreeSans; }
</style>
<span class="cap"><span>A</span>⃣</span>
It isn’t perfect, when using the fonts mentioned. The character in the cap is not quite centered. Moreover, if I try to use the technique e.g. for the character Å (which is present on normal Nordic keyboards), the ring above A extends out of the cap. You could tweak this by setting the font size of the letter in the cap to, say, 85% of the font size of the combining mark, but then the horizontal position of the letter is even more off.
To summarize, it is possible to do such things at the character level, but if you can use other methods, like using a border or a background image for a character, you can probably achieve better rendering.
Following this lead, I tried this in a Github README.md:
<span style="vertical-align: baseline; position: relative;top: -0.5em;>text in superscript</span>
Does not work, the text appears as normal. Help?
Use the <sup></sup>tag (<sub></sub> is the equivalent for subscripts). See this gist for an example.
You have a few options for this. The answer depends on exactly what you're trying to do, how readable you want the content to be when viewed as Markdown and where your content will be rendered:
HTML Tags
As others have said, <sup> and <sub> tags work well for arbitrary text. Embedding HTML in a Markdown document like this is well supported so this approach should work with most tools that render Markdown.
Personally, I find HTML impairs the readable of Markdown somewhat, when working with it "bare" (eg. in a text editor) but small tags like this aren't too bad.
LaTeX (New!)
As of May 2022, GitHub supports embedding LaTeX expressions in Markdown docs directly. This gives us new way to render arbitrary text as superscript or subscript in GitHub flavoured Markdown, and it works quite well.
LaTeX expressions are delineated by $$ for blocks or $ for inline expressions. In LaTeX you indicate superscript with the ^ and subscript with _. Curly braces ({ and }) can be used to group characters. You also need to escape spaces with a backslash. The GitHub implementation uses MathJax so see their docs for what else is possible.
You can use super or subscript for mathematical expressions that require it, eg:
$$e^{-\frac{t}{RC}}$$
Which renders as..
Or render arbitrary text as super or subscript inline, eg:
And so it was indeed: she was now only $_{ten\ inches\ high}$, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden.
Which renders as..
I've put a few other examples here in a Gist.
Unicode
If the superscript (or subscript) you need is of a mathematical nature, Unicode may well have you covered.
I've compiled a list of all the Unicode super and subscript characters I could identify in this gist. Some of the more common/useful ones are:
⁰ SUPERSCRIPT ZERO (U+2070)
¹ SUPERSCRIPT ONE (U+00B9)
² SUPERSCRIPT TWO (U+00B2)
³ SUPERSCRIPT THREE (U+00B3)
ⁿ SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER N (U+207F)
People also often reach for <sup> and <sub> tags in an attempt to render specific symbols like these:
™ TRADE MARK SIGN (U+2122)
® REGISTERED SIGN (U+00AE)
℠ SERVICE MARK (U+2120)
Assuming your editor supports Unicode, you can copy and paste the characters above directly into your document or find them in your systems emoji and symbols picker.
On MacOS, simultaneously press the Command ⌘ + Control + Space keys to open the emoji picker. You can browse or search, or click the small icon in the top right to open the more advanced Character Viewer.
On Windows, you can a emoji and symbol picker by pressing ⊞ Windows + ..
Alternatively, if you're putting these characters in an HTML document, you could use the hex values above in an HTML character escape. Eg, ² instead of ². This works with GitHub (and should work anywhere else your Markdown is rendered to HTML) but is less readable when presented as raw text.
Images
If your requirements are especially unusual, you can always just inline an image. The GitHub supported syntax is:
You can use a full path (eg. starting with https:// or http://) but it's often easier to use a relative path, which will load the image from the repo, relative to the Markdown document.
If you happen to know LaTeX (or want to learn it) you could do just about any text manipulation imaginable and render it to an image. Sites like Quicklatex make this quite easy. Of course, if you know your document will be rendered on GitHub, you can use the new (2022) embedded LaTeX syntax discussed earlier)
Comments about previous answers
The universal solution is using the HTML tag <sup>, as suggested in the main answer.
However, the idea behind Markdown is precisely to avoid the use of such tags:
The document should look nice as plain text, not only when rendered.
Another answer proposes using Unicode characters, which makes the document look nice as a plain text document but could reduce compatibility.
Finally, I would like to remember the simplest solution for some documents: the character ^.
Some Markdown implementation (e.g. MacDown in macOS) interprets the caret as an instruction for superscript.
Ex.
Sin^2 + Cos^2 = 1
Clearly, Stack Overflow does not interpret the caret as a superscript instruction. However, the text is comprehensible, and this is what really matters when using Markdown.
If you only need superscript numbers, you can use pure Unicode. It provides all numbers plus several additional characters as superscripts:
x⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁺⁻⁼⁽⁾ⁿⁱ
However, it might be that the chosen font does not support them, so be sure to check the rendered output.
In fact, there are even quite a few superscript letters, however, their intended use might not be for superscript, and font support might be even worse. Use your own judgement.