Perhaps there are four issues here.
1. Is it permitted in EAD? EAD has nothing to say about character encodings.
2. Is this character valid in XML? Depends on the character encoding you declare.
3. What are the indexing implications? An issue that relates to every diacrtic character but is an implementation question.
4. Inserting a character reference in your editing software. I assume that there is a code point in some character set that defines this character. Seems like you need to associate the two- declaring the character set in the XML declaration and inserting the character entity reference in the EAD instance within the standard XML delimiters, the ampersand and a semi-colon. With character references in XML, one is certainly not limited to the set of characters that any particular editor choses to display in its character map. Editors seem to vary in their ability to render different entities properly within the software. Soemtimes you see the character as intended for display, sometimes the entity reference with the code point.
Michael
-----Original Message-----
From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Michele Combs
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 9:36 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: o with overbar
Anyone know whether the o with the overbar is OK to use in EAD XML? The
overbar alone as a spacer is a legit symbol in the Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1)
character set (listed as ¯) but o *with* the overbar is not an
included letter (see http://www.december.com/html/spec/latin1.html).
Also it doesn't appear in the special characters bar when editing an EAD
document in XMetaL. It's causing some problems with our indexing
process so if I can make a good argument for replacing it with a plain
"o" in our finding aids that would be lovely.
Thanks --
Michele C.
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Michele R. Combs
Librarian for Manuscripts and Archives Processing
Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University Library
222 Waverly Avenue
Syracuse, NY 13244
(315) 443-9758
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