Symbols in product names?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Susan Patrick wonders: <<When a product name has symbols in it, do you have
include the symbols in the name throughout
the user documentation?>>

You have to include the symbols if (a) it's your product and your marketeers
insist on this or (b) the product resembles another product name so closely
that confusion might result if you omitted the special symbols. As a general
rule, you don't have to worry about reproducing the _typography_ of a
product name exactly unless you're reproducing a company's logotype or
wordmark, but you do have to preserve special characters. If you wouldn't
omit the é (that's e with an acute accent in case it didn't survive the
e-mail transfer) in French words, why would you omit other special
characters in other words?

<<We've got a software product name that's an acronym. Let's call it BOB,
short for Bucket Or Beachball. During the development process, someone in
Marketing discovered that there was already another, albeit unrelated,
product on the market called BOB. Our Marketing department decided to
differentiate us by writing BOB with bullets between each letter:
B<bullet>O<bullet>B.>>

Rather than making the more sensible, if more difficult, decision to pick a
distinctive name? <g> Well, the key here is that you claim the other product
is unrelated. If that's true, you should be able to trademark your own BOB
acronym and not have to rely on bullets; you'll see many different
trademarks for the same word used in different applications. But if you
can't trademark the name (and your marketeers should make sure now that you
will be able to obtain a trademark), using bullets won't save you, and
you'll end up having to change the product name shortly after you apply to
have the  trademark registered. Consider, for example, the following
example: If I decide to make a window-cleaning solvent called
M*i*c*r*o*s*o*f*t that has nothing to do with computer software or mice, do
you really think those kind folks in Redmond will let me get away with using
that product name?

<<now we're writing user documentation and typing in all these bullets is
becoming a pain, not to mention a conversion nightmare.>>

If you're forced to use the bullets, doing so shouldn't be very hard. If
you're working in Word, you can set up an autocorrect entry that will
automatically change BOB to B*O*B; if not, search and replace will do the
job. For safety, you might want to replace "&bob" instead to make sure that
no bobcats, London bobbies, or other Bobs will inadvertently get converted,
and you definitely want to do this search and replace _before_ your final
edit to avoid unpleasant surprises. If you're converting into HTML, you can
do a search and replace to replace bullets with the appropriate HTML entity.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html
"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can
think."--Edwin Schlossberg, designer (1945- )

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