NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Degree symbol input
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2010 Sep 22, 18:53 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2010 Sep 22, 18:53 -0700
In Windows, the slow but simple way is to open Character Map and copy the character. (Note that a special character may be available in some fonts but not others.) When you select a character, the status line at the bottom of Character Map gives the official name of the character and, if available, the keyboard shortcut. E.g., Alt+0196 will produce "Latin Capital Letter A with Diaeresis" (Ä). In Kermit's messages, whether viewed by email or the web site, the degree symbol doesn't appear. I see only a ? (question mark). And in his sig the name is spelled "Cou?tte" (a ? symbol between "Cou" and "tte". ISO-6709, "Standard representation of latitude, longitude, and altitude for geographic point locations", uses only ASCII symbols. It provides any desired precision and allows DMS, DM.m, and D.d formats. For example, +1234.5-02345.6/ means 12 degrees 34.5 minutes north, 23 degrees 45.6 minutes west, altitude not specified. This is suitable for machine parsing but I think it's hard to read by eye. The same goes for the aviation format that Kermit suggested. (sorry) I've seen many unconventional angle notations, such as 12o23', 12*23', 12.23, 12'23', all standing for 12 degrees 23 minutes. The one with the "decimal point" that isn't a decimal point is especially bad because it's so ambiguous. Another one encountered hereabouts is 34.567.890, meaning 34.567890 degrees. The cellular phone companies provide lat/lon in this format, which plays hell with the search and rescue forces trying to find a motorcyclist who's broken his leg miles from civilization. If it's necessary to avoid "funny symbols" in angles, I recommend using spaces to separate degrees, minutes, and seconds. E.g., N12 34.5 W067 01.2 is pretty hard to mistake for anything but north 12 degrees 34.5 minutes, west 67 degrees 1.2 minutes. (Or you could write N and W after the minutes.) A sextant angle of 34 degrees 5.5 minutes could be written as 34 05.5 or, with seconds instead of decimal minutes, 34 05 30. --