: Re: Why do most style guides miss out the 'degrees' when reporting temperature? In the UK, the Guardian style guide and the BBC style guide say to report temperatures as "25C" or "90F", with no

@Looi5811334

Vote Up Vote Down

There are two parts that impact issues like this.

The style guides you link are in use for documents that are frequently displayed and transferred between highly variable devices and services - The presence of characters such as the Degree Symbol are still not completely reliable, and using them may result in unexpected values being displayed. As robust as modern computer systems are on average, they're still shockingly brittle and full of holes.

Since the publisher cannot guarantee rendering properties, it makes sense to write guides that avoid common problems. [Such as users trying to read an article on the website while they're forcing their browser to display everything in their own custom 'pretty' font, which also happens to lack characters beyond the core ASCII, if they even cover that much...]

Its still just an annoying character to type reliably on a lot of machines... Even in academic circles I run into a lot of users whining about typing something as basic and common as a degree symbol.

Sometimes it is easier to just remove a simple problem rather than putting up with people who whine about it...

(0)

Login to post a comment!