ASCII Substitution

This is rarely used in Web pages, but still needed for e-mail and other documents.

The Technique

Use an ASCII substitute for a non-Latin 1 glyph. For instance Welsh Web texts replace "circumflex w" (ŵ) with plain "w" or "w+". Similarly, many Old Irish scholars replace the "amperagus" () symbol (Old Irish "&" symbol), with just the number seven (7).

Another typical substitution is to change long vowels (e.g. ā, ē,etc.) from being marked with a macron to being marked with an umlaut, circumflex or other accen mark which is better supported.

ASCII substitutions for phonetic symbols are very common - here's a standardized IPA phonetic alphabet ASCII substitution key.

Tools Needed

• Developers need a keyboard.
• All users will be able to see the glyph.

When to Use it

This is most common in e-mail communcation and rarely found on actual Web pages.

Only for a Roman alphabet script which includes characters not included in the Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding or the Latin 2 (ISO-8859-2) Central European encoding. Examples of such characters include letters with macrons (long marks), special letters in ancient languages and other similar examples.

Potential Pitfalls

1. Search engines and screen readers will not be able to parse it. Put a keymap (e.g. "7" = "amperagus") on the home page explaining your substitutions.
2. You should not use this technique to replace non ASCII-glyphs (e.g. é, ¢) available through Latin 1 HTML special entity codes.

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This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).

Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.

Last Modified: Tuesday, 06-Mar-2007 12:17:27 EST