Entity references are a mechanism for referring to characters, or longer pieces of text, which you cannot type on your keyboard, which must be escaped from the parser, which must be read from external files, or which you simply want to abbreviate.
A reference to an entity amp is of the form
&. It is prefixed by the character & and
suffixed by a semicolon.
The list of entities predefined by the Starlink general DTD is given in Table 1.
| Entity reference | Replacement | Description |
|---|---|---|
© | (c) | Copyright symbol |
& | & | ampersand |
> | > | greater-than symbol |
< | < | less-than symbol |
" | " | quotation mark |
| non-breaking space | |
&hash; | # | hash sign |
£s; | UKP | pounds sign |
$ | $ | dollar sign |
&ellip; | ... | ellipses |
&emdash; | -- | em dash |
&endash; | - | en dash |
&percent; | % | percent sign |
° | (deg) | degrees symbol |
˜ | ~ | tilde |
&underscore; | _ | underscore |
&backslash; | \ | backslash |
&verticalbar; | | | vertical bar |
˙ | . | non-sentence-ending period |
&latex; | LaTeX | LaTeX logo |
&tex; | TeX | TeX logo |
Entities predefined in the Starlink general DTD.
Certain of these entities are used sufficiently often that there
are `short references' declared for them: you can type `_'
instead of `&underscore;' (unsurprisingly), `--' for
a punctuation dash (this is currently set to `&endash;', but
could conceivably change to `&emdash;' if we make a
typographic decision on that score), `"' instead of
`"' and `~' instead of
` '. These short-references work within paragraphs.
See Section 4.10 for a brief discussion of using entities within maths elements.
For more details on entities, see Appendix A.4.