What does "¢" mean in a coordinate?

Question

I'm looking at coordinate pairs defining Australian maritime boundaries. From here.

The coordinate pairs look like this:

AUS-CS-24 14°05¢09.4168²S 156°38¢26.5411²E ITRF2000

AUS-CS-25 14°05¢16.2817²S 156°38¢56.5798²E ITRF2000

My questions is what does the "¢" mean in the context of coordinate data? Also why is there a "²" at the end?

Answer 1

Your viewer, or the website, has some problem with the fonts. Perhaps your browser does not get access to the defined fonts. Works for me, though, and this is how it should look:

Coordinates are expressed as degrees, minutes, and seconds. Try the file downloads https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2012L01081/Download.

EDIT

I have the same issue than you with Firefox. Chrome and Edge show correct characters for minutes and seconds.

Answer 2

It seems to be a problem with the website, and the intended rendering should be using the usual degrees, minutes and seconds symbols: °, ′, and ″. As noted by other users, different browsers and PDF readers behave differently.

If you look at the website's header, you can see that it explicitly claims that the page is UTF-8:

$ curl -v 'https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2012L01081' 2>&1 | grep Content-Type
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />[…]

but instead of using the proper Unicode characters for minute and second, the website uses those characters you see and attempts to change their font to a "Symbol" font:

<p class=TableText>25°55<span style='font-family:Symbol'>¢</span>50.8665<span   style='font-family:Symbol'>²</span>S</p>

The font picked by your browser does not render those symbols as ′, and ″. As noted by other users, different tools have different support for this. In my case both Firefox and Chrome render the characters improperly. I do not have that font on my system. Other users report that Chrome rendered it as expected. My PDF reader both properly renders the font as expected and its search tool seem to be aware of the font because searching for ′ finds the expected characters, while other users report that they need to search for ¢.

The "Symbol" font seems to be a legacy from the pre-Unicode area, as Wikipedia notes:

Full legacy support of the Symbol font is provided by major modern web browsers like Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. That support involves a specific handling of Adobe's special encoding, which is not properly implemented in at least some versions of other browsers, including Opera, Safari and Firefox.

As can also be seen on Wikipedia, this font maps the ′, and ″ characters to the value 0xA2 and 0xB2 respectively. In UTF-8 (that the page claims to be using), those values are continuation characters and should never appear on their own. Web browsers are usually very lenient when it comes to such errors and will try to correct them somehow. In this case it seems your browser falls back to ISO/IEC 8859 (another common encoding with partial compatibility with UTF-8) of which some parts map the values 0xA2 and 0xB2 to ¢ and ² respectively.