Darren Freeman wrote:
I looked around and didn't see this - hopefully not blatantly obvious.
How do I insert the "degree" symbol? As in, 360 degrees to a circle. I
guess there should also be minutes and seconds.
You don't mention what platform you're running on. On Windows, you can
just insert the character normally, using Character Map or Alt-0176 (on
the numeric keypad), or any of the various utilities that let you type
characters not on your keyboard (eg AllChars).
You can also use \textdegree in ERT for the degree sign.
For minutes my preference would be to use the straight apostrophe and
double-quote. The straight double-quote character is available as
Insert | Special Character | Ordinary Quote. (cua.bind also supposedly
makes it C-quotedbl, but that doesn't work for me with LyX 1.3.5 on
Windows; might be fixed in a less ancient version.)
However, there's no obvious LyX mechanism to get straight apostrophe.
In fact, I don't even know if there's a way to get it in LaTeX. It's
not listed in the LaTeX ISO entity reference [1].
There's also prime and Prime (aka double prime), which are "^\prime" and
"{''}", respectively, in math-mode; you can also enter those in ERT as
"$^\prime$" and "${''}$". The LaTeX ISO character reference sheet lists
these as "prime or minute" and "double prime or second", so I guess
they're the official minute/second glyphs. Not terribly lovely or
convenient, though.
There's also "variant prime", "{'}" in math-mode or "${'}$" in ERT, as
an alternative to ^\prime; that's a bit more consistent.
I suppose you could put the whole expression in math-mode, and use
"^\circ" (superscript circle) for the degree sign. That's a bit tricky
if you're not used to working in math mode. Say for example you want 20
degrees, 30 minutes, 40 seconds. Enter math mode (the "a+b/c" button on
the toolbar), then type "20^\circ" (without the quotes). Press
right-arrow twice to terminate the \circ entity and get out of the
superscript box. Type "30\{'" and press right-arrow to get past the },
which LyX automatically inserts for you. Type "40\{''" and press
right-arrow to get past the }, then space to get out of math-mode.
So, in summary, I'd say math-mode works OK, but this looks like a golden
opportunity to practice LyX customization to make it easier to enter
this kind of information, if you have to do it more than once or twice.
[1] http://www.bitjungle.com/isoent/
--
Michael Wojcik
