Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams

Representing Non-English Characters

Contributions with names that employ diacritic marks (accents, umlauts, etc.) are advised not to use special control codes (e.g., 8-bit ASCII) to to represent these characters, as they frequently do not survive transmission via e-mail.

Use of the scheme below will ensure that any special characters required in your item/report will survive transmission via e-mail. The scheme is that used by the TeX typesetting system. The examples below can be extrapolated to other letters as necessary. Use of the curly brackets in some cases as indicated below is important.

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Character to     Description                  Textual (ASCII)
be represented                                representation

    è            Small e, grave accent           \`e
    é            Small e, acute accent           \'e
    ê            Small e, circumflex accent      \^e

    Ü            Capital U, diaeresis or umlaut  \"U

    ã            Small a, tilde                  \~a

    Ç            Capital C, cedilla              \c{C}

    ř            Small r, hacek                  \v{r}

    Æ            Capital Norwegian diphthong     {\AE}
    æ            Small Norwegian diphthong       {\ae}
    Ø            Capital Norwegian O-slash       {\O}
    ø            Small Norwegian O-slash         {\o}
    Å            Capital Norwegian aa            {\AA}
    å            Small Norwegian aa              {\aa}



Some Examples

   Word             Textual (ASCII) representation

   échelle          \'echelle

   Ångström         {\AA}ngstr\"om

   Besançon         Besan\c{c}on

   Pajdušáková      Pajdu\v{s}\'akov\'a



Other helpful TeX commands.  Exponents are denoted by a caret (^),
 with whatever is to be raised placed inside curly brackets; thus,
 10 to the 25th power would be written 10^{25}.  Likewise, subscripts
 are denoted by an underline (_).  (Simply give plus-or-minus as "+/-".)
 Also, use  \it  for italicizing,  \bf  for boldface type, and
 \rm  for regular Roman type.  One can use curly brackets to encompass
 a single word/phrase in italics or boldface, as  {\it Ap.J.} {\bf 23}, 422.

For details on other specialist symbols that your item/report may require you are referred to textbooks on TeX. E.g., The TeXbook by D. E. Knuth, 1986 (ISBN 0-201-13448-9).