Diacritics for indexers

Abstract

Each person who works on a file needs to ensure that those who come after will see all of the intended characters correctly. Changing fonts so that you can see the actual character on screen is extremely dangerous to the project. Even using the Unicode character set of a single font collection may result in conflicts. But if you mix fonts, for example using Arial throughout the index except for a couple of characters from the Tahoma font, you are virtually guaranteeing that the typesetter will produce master pages with errors. So, argues Gale Rhoades, take the safe route and use codes to indicate non-basic characters (asking advice from your publisher as to what they would like). And if you’ve got away with it so far? That’s fine until . . .