This is a snippet of LaTeX I put together so that I could use asterisms (⁂) when writing papers. I use them to mark off sections of text which will need further attention when editing.

I should really get around to cleaning up and posting the LaTeX macro files that I've been assembling over the years. And who knows, maybe there's some other STEM folks who get as excited over obscure typographical marks as I do. (There are dozens of us! Dozens!)

There are other macros floating around out there that will create asterisms, but the ones I tried don't work if you're not using single-spacing/standard leading. This one will do so — best I can tell — in addition to working with different sized text, etc.

Updated:

I've got a much, much simpler solution than the one I gave below, and it appears to get rid of the weird beginning-of-paragraph bug I sometimes ran in to with the solution I posted previously. I haven't tested it extensively, but it seems to work far better than the older version, and it's certainly much easier to understand.

\newcommand{\asterism}{%
\makebox[1em][c]{%
\makebox[0pt][c]{\raisebox{-0.8ex}{\smash{**}}}%
\makebox[0pt][c]{\raisebox{0.2ex}{\smash{*}}}%
}}

For the record, here's the old version:

\newcommand{\asterism}{%
  \smash{%
    \begin{minipage}[t]{1.2em}%
      \centering%
      \begin{spacing}{1.0}%
        \raisebox{-.15em}{%
          \setlength{\tabcolsep}{.025em}%
          \renewcommand*{\arraystretch}{0.5}%
          \resizebox{1.05em}{!}{%
            \begin{tabular}{@{}cc@{}}%
              \multicolumn{2}{c}*\$$!-0.5em]%
              *&*%
            \end{tabular}%
          }% end resizebox
        }% end raisebox
      \end{spacing}%
    \end{minipage}%
  }% end smash
}