RCDC Extended Character Encoding

Historically the chemical literature has required more than the ASCII character set used on most computers. The Radiation Chemistry Data Center has developed and used a compact encoding scheme as its needs required. The RCDC scheme uses the ASCII characters $, \, @ and ^. This scheme is still used in our data base and thus in the search requests and in the lists of results for solution kinetics. The displays of bibliographic titles and solution kinetic data attempt to show the intended Greek and math characters and formatting such as bold and italic.

Computer display methods have evolved along several paths, such as typewriters, laser printers and CRTs. The displays have not yet evolved to a single universal way of encoding the needed information. Some characters have different codes on different display systems, e.g. Windows vs. MacOS or Explorer vs. Netscape vs.Mozilla. Further older and newer versions of software may differ and the printed page may not match the screen display. For the data display pages we have encoded the extended characters, e.g. math symbols and Greek letters, to display well on the computer-browser combination used by most of our users. The following list of our code, the glyph displayed on your system and a description may help you to understand these displays. (® ³ Unless this line begins with an arrow and a greater than or equal symbol, your browser is not displaying the intended symbol.)

subscripts and superscripts

@ and ^ enclose subscripts and superscripts

Water may be encoded as H@2^O and displayed as H2O or hydrogen ion encoded as H^+@ and displayed as H+. Some, mostly older, browsers may not render subscripts and superscripts. Usually they will appear as digits or plus or minus signs and should cause little confusion.

special characters

$ changes the following one character such as $a for a (alpha). The following characters are known to cause problems for some browsers.

Code Display Character Code Display Character
$+ ± plus/minus $" · raised dot, radical
$o ° degree $T ® arrow, points to the right
$< £ less than or equal $> ³ greater than or equal
$a a alpha $b b beta
$c y psi $q g gamma
$w d delta $W D Delta, upper case
$e e epsilon $m m mu
$n n nu $t t tau
$* ‡ double dagger $4 † dagger
$X º triple bond $= Û equilibrium arrow
$Z » approx. equal $) ¹ not equal

formatting

\ plus the following character is used for bold, etc. and for a few additional special characters.