How to escape escape characters?

[gshenaut]

I have a couple of references with a pipe sign in the title, like this:

Perlman, G., & Horan, F. L. (1986). Report on UNIX|STAT release 5.1: Data analysis programs for UNIX and MSDOS. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 18(2), 168-176. doi:10.3758/BF03201019

I think the pipe sign is interpreted as a subscript, which is how it is displayed.

Is there some easy way to escape the special meaning?

[Jon]

No, but in preferences you can either assign a different character for subscript of turn it off completely.

Jon
Sonny Software

[gshenaut]

OK. First I tried changing the subscript character to _ but I had any number of _ in URLs, etc., so I changed it to \ (the sole remaining option), and BookEnds beachballed. After several minutes, I force quit. When I reopened it and tried opening the library again, beachball again: force quit. Then I reopened it but didn't open the library until after I'd set subscripts to None; that worked, but of course I now have no subscript capability.

I recognize that perhaps two-character escape/control sequences aren't desirable in entries, but have you considered allowing special characters that are outside of the conventional text/punctuation space? For example, H↓2↓0 or πr⇡2⇡? That would make it less likely to collide with characters used in computer science or other technical references.

[Jon]

No one has ever asked for it before. I'll add it to the request list.

Jon
Sonny Software