Christos time

Xmas time again. Useless information for the day: the X in Xmas is really the Greek letter Chi  'ch' as in Christos. This is where a simple blog entry about Xmas became more complex. I thought, fool that I am, if it's Greek letter, why not put the Greek letter in? Then I realised I didn't know how. So I had to learn how to insert a non standard symbol into Blogger.

A bit of Googling later and I discover that I really ought to be using Unicode characters rather than symbol fonts like Symbol, let alone Wingdings or Webdings. I had forgotten that typography gets some people really cross and very strong opinions are held.

So, the easiest way is to type an ampersand (&) and then the Capitalised or uncapitalised Greek letter name we want (like Alpha, beta, gamma, delta etc) and then a semi colon (;) without leaving any spaces. Or we can type & followed immediately by hash (#)  and then a special number that corresponds to the character you want followed immediately by a semi colon. Unless you happen to be Rain Man I suggest this is not the easy way.

Or if all you want is an upper case Chi you can just use an upper case X if we want to cheat because it looks much the same in this font. Which makes it a pretty poor choice for a demonstration. If we did it in lower case it would be χ but that would be incorrect for a proper name or title but would look way more impressive.

Just to check, Psi should be Ψ and Phi should be Φ. But they wont display immediately. I find that if I change my editing mode to HTML and then back to Compose, Blogger updates the screen with the Greek letter.

Let's try some more: ζ, Γ, Δ, δ, β, Ω ω, ρ. Yeah, that's pretty cool if you happen to know your Greek alphabet. Anyway, having typeset a single character to my satisfaction, I've pretty much forgotten what I was going to say.

So, Merry Typography and a Happy Unicode.