As much as possible, you should use 7-bit ASCII characters in your ETD record. ASCII characters include the numbers 0-9, the upper- and lower-case letters A-Z, and the basic punctuation marks used in English, but do not include any letters with diacritical marks like accents or umlauts. The ASCII character set is identical to the printable characters in the Unicode Basic Latin chart.
If your submission requires the use non-ASCII characters, the OhioLINK ETD Center supports the same character entity names used in HTML. Please note the exact syntax for writing a character entity. The syntax is:
For example, the markup for a capital letter A with an acute accent is
Á (Á). Names of character entities
are case-sensitive. Á and á are different
characters (Á vs. á).
You may also enter any Unicode character as a numeric entity if you know the number corresponding to your character. For HTML characters, this is also found in the list of HTML character entities. The syntax for a numeric reference is:
For example, the numeric reference for a capital O with an umlaut is Ö (Ö). A Czech lower-case s with a caron mark is š (š). Browser support for displaying characters outside of HTML entities may be unpredictable.
Note that you may not use HTML <font> elements to attempt to
create special characters or other effects. Some HTML editing software,
for example, attempts to create a Greek letter Σ with the markup
<font face="symbol">S<font face="symbol">.
In an ETD record, this will appear as an S.
The correct markup for a capital Sigma is Σ.
Your abstract may include some markup tags to add meaning, and possibly to affect the display, of some of your text. The available tags are paragraphs and a subset of the HTML inline elements. Note that in the ETD Center, tag names must be lower-case.
If you are unfamiliar with HTML-style markup, you may wish to consult a good HTML guide for basic information on using tags. Note: your ETD record is not an HTML document, and you cannot rely on using HTML elements other than those listed below. Other tags may prevent the system from loading your document correctly and may be stripped out of your record.
You may use the following inline elements when marking up your title or abstract:
<p>A paragraph (note that the opening and closing
tags are both required)</p><em>Emphasized text</em><i>Italicized text</i><strong>Strongly emphasized
text</strong><b>Bold face text</b><sup>Superscript text</sup><sub>Subscript text</sub>Markup for the ETD Center does not support lists, inline images, font settings, line breaks, or tables. Any unsupported tags will be removed from the ETD record.
You may paste a working copy of titles and abstracts from versions in word processors. However, many word processors, including Microsoft Word, use a number of characters that are not allowed in ETD files. These characters (ASCII characters 127 through 159) include the Windows version of "smart" or "curly" single and double quotes, the ellipsis character, and em- and en-dashes. We recommend that you substitute either valid HTML character entities for these, or use straight quotes, three periods, and hyphens as replacements.