How can I add the French trademark symbol (MD)?

Question

I have a report that needs to be output in either English or French (based on a field value).

I have copied the text from the Word document to the SSRS package, and all French characters show as they should except MD (marque déposée). This should show similar to superscript "MD", but it shows as normal script "MD".

Is there a library of French symbols that I can add, or is there a way to format it so that it "appears" right?

I have tried:

• adding MD to a separate textbox and formatting it so it looks right, and having the 2 textboxes overlap, but when printed the second textbox relocates to below the first on the page.
• printing the French paragraph as an image, but it does not appear as clear as the printed English page.

Answer 1

For situations like this unicode superscript characters can come in handy. I copied the unicode for the letters MD from the link into the SSRS report and it worked no problem.

Example:

• MD = ᴹᴰ
• TM = ᵀᴹ

Unicode:

• M - 7481 - http://unicodelookup.com/#7481/1
• D - 7472 - http://unicodelookup.com/#7472/1
• T - 7488 - http://unicodelookup.com/#7488/1

Answer 2

The MC and MD symbols do appear as single superscript symbols in Unicode, though not necessarily in all fonts, as 1F16A and 1F16B respectively:

• MC = marque de commerce, Unicode 1F16A 🅪, HTML 🅪 (in English TM trade mark sign)
• MD = marque déposée, Unicode 1F16B 🅫, HTML 🅫 (in English R registered sign)

These symbols are generally used in Canadian French.

Sources:

• http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F100.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosed_Alphanumeric_Supplement
• https://codepoints.net/U+1F16A
• https://codepoints.net/U+1F16B

Answer 3

The symbol does not exist as a separate character (unlike the “™” symbol), so this is essentially a matter of rendering some letters in superscript style. There are several alternatives, with different pros and cons:

1. Use <sup>MD</sup>. Simple, but results in poor rendering: line spacing may get disturbed, and the letters appear as reduced-size capital letters, suffering from reduced stroke width, so they stylistically differ from normal letters.
2. Use <span class=sup>MD</span> and style it with CSS, using relative positioning and font size reduction. Avoids some drawbacks of method 1, but not all.
3. Use special characters, as mentioned in @BrotherOdin’s answer: MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL M (U+1D39) and MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL D (U+1D30), which you can insert e.g. as ᴹᴰ. The main problem with them is that not all fonts contain them, and their visual appearance may differ from your expectations – they are really designed for use in phonetic notations rather than normal text.
4. Use <span class=sup>MD</span> and style it with font-feature-settings: "sups" and its browser-prefixed versions, and use OpenType fonts that have superscript glyph variants for letters. This is the theoretically best approach, but currently fails too often (partly due to limited browser support, partly due to lack of such OpenType features in most fonts).