You use symbols to produce characters that cannot be entered from the keyboard. A symbol begins with an ampersand (&) and is followed by the symbol name and a period. For example, to produce a square bullet, which looks like this: 

þ
Enter the symbol like this: 
&sqbul.

If you want the ampersand character (&) to appear in text, define it as the symbol, &amp. Otherwise, the IPF compiler tries to interpret whatever text follows the ampersand character as the name of a symbol, and will return the error message, Invalid symbol.

Symbols are case-sensitive. That is, if you do not type them exactly as the appear in the symbols table (see Symbols) you could get either the message, Invalid Symbol, or a symbol different from the one you want.

Note: The symbols table is also available online when you install the Online Information component of the Developer's Toolkit for OS/2.