Great list, but when I get down to the Expanded Character Entity List, Misc. Symbols, I cannot see a great many of them, even on this website. On the ones I can't see, within the brackets all I see are two vertical, light-colored lines. For example, I can see the "Ohm" symbol, but I cannot see the "Inverted Ohm" symbol.

What's the deal? Do I have one of them state-of-the-art military machines too?

You don't need to be so hurtful about it.

<font>;) :D</font>

Here: try this list.

They ran on both gasoline AND batteries? Amazing! :eek:

Thoser were the later, greener models. Originally, they ran on steam (from burning coal.)

Depending on what font you are using is what you should see. In other words behind the charachter is a 1 or 2 byte value, which can be mapped to different images depending on the fonts.
To see all these maps you could go to start --> All programs --> accessories --> System tool --> Character mapping (assuming Windows and beyond)

You will find the star in various maps Ex : Font Wingdings/2 (0XAC)
That is probably why people are seeing different images.

I am quite positive there is much more to this, but this seesm to be the cause of the issues mentioned above.

I learned something new.

Oh good point, though I thought it was steam and the tears of children.

Edit: Oh my we've done it now, look at the ad banners on the top.

I've heard tell that there were models that were entirely human-powered, but that may just be an eco-dream...

In your MS word document, double click INSERT. When the drop down menu appears, click on Symbols then take your choice. Cheers

You are correct, the coal heats the tears to steam.

That sounds far fetched; sort of like the rumor about watches that don't need batteries. ;)

If the font you are using does not map the symbol (ex star), you cannot just simply " double click INSERT", you need to change font and get your symbol.
Each charachter in each font map has a unique hex value, however the same value can be used across multiple font maps to represent differnt charachters. That is why enbedded within your word document are strings of control characters to identify charechteristics such as FONT being used, size, colour etc etc,

Word is kind enough to remember the "recently use symbols", but if you look at the lower lefthand corner, the font name and the decimal value is given
What makes the symbol unique is "FONT + hex value (offset into the map table)".

Al lot of applications do not offer this "symbol feature".

Regardless of all of this, the problem lies on the receiver side not the sender. If the receiver get the word document and does not have the FONT that the sender used, the symbol seen by the receiver will be different (depends on what the receivers default FONT is) and thus a different symbol is seen. (Example I gave was the 0xAC in Wingdings font maps to a 6 pointed star but in FONT Arial it is a NOT sign.
The only way I know to ensure that the receivers get the image you want them to get is by resorting to a graphic representation of the symol.

In summary and repeating myself (sorry)
If the receiving application does not support (ie does not have the font map for example), then the representation will be whatever the current FONT being used maps the hex value/s too (please note some symbols are represented by 2 bytes) ,


Appologies for the length of this reply