Trademark symbol, LaTeX, and Unicode

Earlier this year I was a coauthor on a paper about the Cap Score™ test for male fertility from Androvia Life Sciences [1]. I just noticed today that when I added the publication to my CV, it caused some garbled text to appear in the PDF.

garbled LaTeX output

Here is the corresponding LaTeX source code.

LaTeX source

Fixing the LaTeX problem

There were two problems: the trademark symbol and the non-printing symbol denoted by a red underscore in the source file. The trademark was a non-ASCII character (Unicode U+2122) and the underscore represented a non-printing (U+00A0). At first I only noticed the trademark symbol, and I fixed it by including a LaTeX package to allow Unicode characters:

    \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}

An alternative fix, one that doesn’t require including a new package, would be to replace the trademark Unicode character with \texttrademark\. Note the trailing backslash. Without the backslash there would be no space after the trademark symbol. The problem with the unprintable character would remain, but the character could just be deleted.

Trademark and Unicode

I found out there are two Unicode code points render the trademark glyph, U+0099 and U+2122. The former is in the Latin 1 Supplement section and is officially a control character. The correct code point for the trademark symbol is the latter. Unicode files U+2122 under Letterlike Symbols and gives it the official name TRADE MARK SIGN.

Related posts

[1] Jay Schinfeld, Fady Sharara, Randy Morris, Gianpiero D. Palermo, Zev Rosenwaks, Eric Seaman, Steve Hirshberg, John Cook, Cristina Cardona, G. Charles Ostermeier, and Alexander J. Travis. Cap-Score™ Prospectively Predicts Probability of Pregnancy, Molecular Reproduction and Development. To appear.

One thought on “Trademark symbol, LaTeX, and Unicode

  1. “\texttrademark{} ” would also likely preserve the space, and is in my mind slightly neater. I’m not sure what would happen if you’re ending a sentence in a \texttrademark, whether latex would think your command is “textrademark.” and give an error, or correctly separate out the punctuation. \texttrademark{} should always work.

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