DOCBOOK-APPS: DSSSL stylesheets v1.67 breaks SGML DocBook v4.1 (?)

[Alex Lancaster <alexl@bigfoot.com>]

It appears that version 1.67 of the DSSSL stylesheets has broken the
SGML compatibility.

When I attempt to parse an SGML document I get error messages like this:

/usr/bin/jade -V biblio-citation-check -c ../catalog  -c /home/alex/src/sourceforge.net/docbook/docbook/sgml/docbook.cat -c /home/alex/stylesheets/docbook-dsssl-1.67/catalog -c /usr/lib/sgml/sgml-common.cat -V tex-backend -t tex -iprint -d '/home/alex/src/Swarm/swarmdocs/print.dsl' -o _overbook.tex /home/alex/src/Swarm/swarmdocs/overbook/overbook.sgml
/usr/bin/jade:/home/alex/stylesheets/docbook-dsssl-1.67/print/../common/dbl1cs.ent:8:33:E: "283" is not a character number in the document character set

[...]

On closer inspection, I note that the *.ent files in
docbook-dsssl-1.67/common, have unicode characters like:

<!ENTITY Article         "&#268;l&#225;nek">

whereas the old (working) version (1.57) had entries like this (what
is this format, is it unicode?):

<!ENTITY Article        "\U-010C;l\U-00E1;nek">

I note that Norm has changed the entity generation system to be
generated from a (new) common `xmlcharent' module, and I think this
must be an artifact of that change.  But somewhere along the line SGML
must have dropped out of the picture.  (Does SGML grok unicode, for
example, I don't know?)

In any case, is this a bug or feature?  i.e. is there a simple fix,
such as changing someline in a .dcl or somesuch?  I suspect I may be
the first to run into this error, since AFAIK this new character
entity generation was only added in 1.67.  (I couldn't find anything
in the mailing list archives...)

Alex
-- 
Alex Lancaster * alexl@bigfoot.com * www.santafe.edu/~alex * +1 510 642-1233