Mishalak

A few of you may have noiced my tendancy to use things like <grin> rather than smiley faces. Still fewer might have tried to imitate me or done it on their own and not had it work out. This is because Livejournal assumes that anything in the < > is code. But you can get displayed symbols instead of code by calling them using certain sequences of characters. For example &amp; makes the &. Which is useful for writing out these codes to show someone else. Because otherwise they would just show as the symbol, natch.

&lt; becomes <
&gt; becomes >

Don't put spaces after them, think of the whole block as just one character that you could use in the middle of a word just like any other character. There is a page on everything2 that I find useful to figure out what a symbol is if I need to use it when writing up html by hand. They have nearly everything from latin and math characters to weird wingdingy things. Though it should be noted that if you can just past the symbol in from your word processing program most of the time it will show up here fine. ƒ