Inserting a copyright symbol in LyX with LaTeX
13 Aug 2005I’ve been playing with LyX over the last three days or so as my English major work comes into the final stages both of writing — the idea itself is finalised — and typesetting, which is ultimately why I’m using LyX in the first place (though its output is so brilliant I think I’m going to start using it on a more permanent basis).
Judging from the websites I’ve stumbled across whilst giving myself a crash course on using it, that’d make me one of the few users of the application that didn’t regularly make use of its extensive Math features to the point that I talk equations in my sleep. (Though it seems there are some humanities users out there!) But I digress.
One of the niggly things I’ve discovered is that it is incurably difficult to do little things taken for granted in normal WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org (as opposed to LyX, which proclaims itself “the first WYSIWYM document processor.”) — though of course it is intended to be far more high end than these applications — not the least of which is the difficulty of inserting certain symbols.
LyX, being a graphical interface to the LaTeX and TeX processing frameworks, supports raw input by way of ERT. This is the secret to getting special characters that display sensibly in LyX itself.
Note that it is possible to copy and paste a copyright symbol into LyX from another program, and that Mac users can simply press Option + G to insert this character (lucky little…). In the case of copying and pasting, however, there is the unfortunate side effect of the character displaying as an unknown character block (due to the character set in use, I imagine) — which, when editing large documents, can be time consuming (think “What did that unknown character say again?” whilst editing).
So, the best way I’ve found is simply to use an ERT insert.
Simply create a new ERT insert by pressing Ctrl + L, and enter
\copyright
into it.
This is a LaTeX shortcut that seems to work fine, with one caveat (could just be my system): the copyright symbol appears only as a circle at less than 100% zoom in Xdvi. Note that exported PDF or PS documents don’t suffer this problem, and seeing as Xdvi manages fine at 100% I’m inclined to believe it’s just a rendering bug in that application.
Now I can stop procrastinating and get back to typing my major work that doesn’t have a single copyright symbol in it (it’ll be Creative Commons licenced)!