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Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: representing and rendering symbol characters
Honored DocBooklians: We're converting styled FrameMaker text to XML DocBook. A particular worry is how to handle the symbol characters from the symbol and dingbat fonts (and from the extended character set). The documents sometimes use a symbol as an embedded image rather than for its conventional meaning. 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. We could redefine the ISO entities as HTML image tags. (Are the glyph bitmaps from the DocBook guide okay to reuse?) This approach, however, would prevent changing the symbol size through the font size. Does the symbol font have a consistent character set across platforms? If so, we could redefine the ISO entities as HTML font tags applying the symbol font to the appropriate characters. At that point, it becomes tempting to skip the middleman and store the font association in the XML file, rationalizing it as a way to specify the symbol. This approach would also handle characters (particularly dingbats) that don't have equivalent ISO entities. What would be the best way to delimit the symbol characters in the XML? Using an emphasis or phrase element with a role attribute? For instance, to represent the arrowright symbol via the \xae hex character in the symbol set: <emphasis role="symbolset">\xae</emphasis> Or is there some better way to handle this? Thanks in advance for any clarifications or suggestions, Erik Hennum erik.hennum@informix.com
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