special characters

[StuartBurchell]

Do publishers frown on these?

I have a few characters of Norwegian ancestry in my story and many have letters modern English (and modern English keyboards) do not use anymore.

Wish I knew how to type examples here...

Not just letters with a line or two dots above the letter, but like the letter thorn(e) Y with the 'trunk'? going up between the arms, or the a and e being joined together.

Letters like that.

 

[Juliana]

Are you thinking in terms of submissions? I'd just use the characters, and if a publisher wants to work with you they'll let you know their in-house preferences.

 

[Hex]

What Juliana said. Unless they get in the way of your story and make it incomprehensible, go with whatever you like for now.

 

[The Judge]

I think it will also depend on what use you are making of the letters. If you are showing eg an email or equivalent someone has written in Norwegian or Old Norse, and it's necessary for the plot it isn't in English (eg whoever wrote only speaks Norwegian and there has to be a laborious translation), or there's a bar known by a Norwegian name, then there should be no problem. If you're just shoving the letters in as an attempt to show these people have a Norwegian background, but there's no real reason for the use of the different alphabet, then that might be more problematic. Context is everything.


NB If it helps, I add letters/accents not easily found on my keyboard by finding the requisite symbol in Word, inserting it into a document and then cutting and pasting to here -- it usually works eg æ ... þ ... ð

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Just do it for the few names etc. worry later about them working for other people. The keyboard isn't the issue and for about 20 years the display or print isn't an issue. It's just the format of language settings that can be an issue. The older eReaders, especially Kindle gen 3 (the Kindle DXG was last) have limited font and glyphs. They certainly can't do Chinese, Hebrew, Cyrillic via text (I've done a Chinese name using a small inline image, worked fine).

Thorn þ is the commonest old scandinavian character. Early Printers used Y instead of th or þ, hence Ye instead of The.

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland where it survives.

Thorn might even work on old Kindles, as it's part of Latin/Roman characters along with áíóúé etc
http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/doc/EditChar.html
Runes and other Scandinavian characters than thorn or accented such as ø or ö (also fine) are best done as images.
So any character used today in Swedish etc + thorn is usually OK.

The methods to type in a thorn vary between Apple Mac, Windows and Linux, but are trivial.
On Windows use Charmap accessory
On Linux the aeiou keys with alt Gr key do same as on windows ( áíóúé ) and p with Alt Gr = þ and Shift AltGr P = Þ