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representing and rendering symbol characters
- To: docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Subject: DOCBOOK-APPS: representing and rendering symbol characters
- From: Erik Hennum <erik dot hennum at informix dot com>
- Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 13:30:34 -0800
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