Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: representing and rendering symbol characters

[Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.COM>]

> Erik Hennum wrote:
> 
> > Most of the character set from the symbol font could be mapped
> > to ISO character entities.  However, rendering the entity seems
> > problematic.
> > 
> > The HTML XSLT scripts pass through the ISO entities in the
> > generated HTML.  The mainstream browsers seem to have
> > only limited support for the ISO entities.
> 
> Which XSLT processor did you use? In generated HTML there should not be
> entity references (except for chars from ISO Latin 1), there should be
> only character references in form &#code; where code is Unicode/ISO10646
> character code. If your browser supports Unicode (this for example true
> for IE and Mozilla on Windows, probably also other browsers/platforms)
> there should not be problem with displaying these character glyphs.

And connecting this to Docbook, the conversion of characters
from Framemaker to Docbook XML needs to map them to the ISO entities
listed in the Docbook iso-*.ent files included with
the Docbook DTD.  For example, in iso-tech.ent you see:

<!ENTITY infin  "&#x221E;"> 

The FrameMaker infinity character
should be converted to "&infin;" in your Docbook XML
files so you have a nice mnemonic entity.
The ent declaration identifies it properly by
its Unicode character in XML, and Norm's stylesheets
should render that Unicode character in whatever output format
you choose, including HTML.

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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                                            email: bobs@sco.com