Need help from the VURD, pretty please.

[saffronhare]

My references at work are failing me, so I'm turning to the VURD for help. It's a matter of trademark use (like, the actual mark) within ad copy. I think I know which way it should go, but I lack a citation to back up my assertion.

Company!(r)
or
Company(r)!

Essentially, in a subheadline, does the registration mark need to be before the exclamation point or after it? The Company name does not include an exclamation point.

What I need is for somebody with access to such a citation to please let me know which one is correct and tell me where you found it. Wikipedia or force of opinion is NOT going to be useful here. Something like AP style, Chicago style, or even Turabian is what I need.

Please and THANK YOU.

Comments

What I found

[celticwhistlin.livejournal.com]

http://central.kaserver5.org/Kasoft/Typeset/Rules/R.html

Rules for setting trademarks and product names
R14. Trademarks and product names (including computer applications) must be set with initial capitals in place as recommended by the owner or producer.

If the owner or producer uses a leading lower case letter, it is preferable to make this title case unless it leads to ambiguity or confusion. It is required to use a leading title case letter where the trademark or product name begins a sentence, or where the name may be confused with a natural language word.

The use of lower case letters only in UNIX utility names is optional if the author's position is not known or using title casing would cause no ambiguity. It is important to be consistent within documents and sets of documents, however. Use the same font for computer listing literals if you feel compelled for reasons of clarity or technical accuracy (say in user documentation) to include the lower case form in some places, but not in others (where you would use the ordinary body text font.) e.g. It is technically inaccurate for a user to invoke the Lame MPEG audio encoder by issuing the command Lame, because UNIX uses a case-sensitive filing system. Therefore is is better to say "then run lame against the appropriate input file" rather than "then run Lame against..."
R15. Unusual characters (such as punctuation) in trademarks or product names must be retained in place as recommended by the owner or producer.

If a character has no Unicode symbol in the chosen body text font, or is a stylized representation chosen for rendition for the mark, then a surrogate may be used or the character dropped entirely provided this would cause no confusion or ambiguity.

The use of the exclamation mark to begin RISC OS application names is optional if the author's position is not known or its omission would cause no ambiguity. It is important to be consistent within documents and sets of documents, however. Use the same font for computer listing literals if you feel compelled for reasons of clarity (say in user documentation) to include the exclamation mark in some places, but not in others (where you would use the ordinary body text font.)
R16. Trademarks which have become common natural language words themselves must only be title cased when the reference is to the particular product to which that name is given (unless the word is title cased for reasons other than rule 14.)

For example, if you are refering to Frisbee's frisbee, use "Frisbee", but if you are referring to flying plates in general, use "frisbee."

Words which are historically natural language words, but have trademark meanings, are also covered by this rule.
R17. Do not use the trademark or registered trademark symbol outside graphical representations.

(Corollary to rules 14, 15 and 16, which allow trademarks to be adequately distinguished without these cumbersome and unsightly abberations.)
R18. Copyright symbol precedes either author or year, and is always followed by a space.

Copyright symbols should only be used at the beginning or end of a document, in headers, title pages, footers and bibliographies, and never in the normal flow of text. Consider reducing the size of the copyright symbol to 80% of its normal size if it appears to be too large in your chosen font—unfortunately this is often the case.

[celticwhistlin.livejournal.com]

From what I read, it would almost seem preferable to not have the trademark at the end of the sentence as there were no specific reference to punctuation related to the notation.

There was, however, extensive information related to the use of the trademark in other positions in the sentence.

From my understanding of the use of trademarks, it would make more sense to use Company(r)! unless the ! is in the trademark (which is possible) and would lead to the use of Company!(r), although that is more my opinion than something I can cite.

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

That's a great start. Thank you!

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Try Rule B.1.2 from the MLA guide, if you have one? That came up in a search for me, though I don't have a copy...

::edit:: And it vouched for Company(r)!, of course.

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

That's good. I don't have one, but I'll throw the rule at them. I hate that formatting, too. What I *want* to do is emphasize that it's not a headline and therefore shouldn't have the feckin' symbol anyway.

Thank you. :)

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

*grin* I love throwing untested citations at people outside my 'field'. :)

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

I love it when a citation can back up my "I told you so."

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

If you must use the symbol for some bizarre technical reason, you might consider using a smaller font for just the symbol and making it significantly smaller.