Re: Entity files for Jade/DocBook?

[MARK.WROTH@xxxxxxxxxxx (Wroth, Mark)]

First of all, my thanks to the several people who replied indicating
that there causing the RTF backend of JADE to get MS Word to display
selected "special" characters (the Greek letter alpha being the test
case) can in fact be done, contrary to what I though I had learned.  As
they say, knowing that it can be done is half  of the battle.

	I am now sort of persuaded that my problems are largely related
to the MS Word installation (as opposed to Word itself).  The entity
α (supposed to be alpha), as was the (DocBook defined, which I
think really means ISO-defined) entity α was appearing as "aacute"
in both the math flow objects and in ordinary running text.
Interestingly, the character was in the "Symbol Greek" font, which does
not exist in my system, and that seems to be the root of my problem.  

	Unfortunately, mapping that font to "Symbol" results in
displaying a "(" (I think -- the glyph is not unambiguous). Manually
changing the character to an "a" (highlighting it and pressing the "a"
key) causes it to display an alpha.  It also results in following text
displaying in Greek (up to some point which looks arbitrary to me, but
is probably related to RTF grouping).

	At this point I downloaded the MS Word 97 viewer, which does a
better job (with -trtf as opposed to -trtf-95 which I had been using).
It still displays "alpha" as an "a, in a different font, but it displays
"sigma" and "lambda" as sigma and lambda, so I suspect this is the
design of the alpha in whatever font is being used.

	While I still haven't solved my problem, I'm beginning to think
this conversation doesn't belong on this list, as I am now playing games
with Word as opposed to DSSSL or even SGML.  So I'd like to say thank
you to everyone; I don't intend to follow-up after this posting unless
the group decides that the issues involved with Word are germane.

	Thanks again for all of the help,

	Mark


(BTW, attempting to directly define <!ENTITY myalpha "&#945"> in a
DocBook document caused Jade to complain that 945 was not a character in
the SGML character set.  Since I was just experimenting to be sure I had
defined the entity the way I thought I had, I did the experiment with a
different declaration & DTD without trying to track down the reason. So
much to learn, so little, time...)


Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 09:20:42 GMT
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Entity files for Jade/DocBook?

> But I'm having a conceptual problem with your suggestion to use the
math
> flow objects.  I thought that by the time the DSSSL process was
> underway, the SGML parser had already replaced entity references with
> their definitions?  So how would one apply a flow object to a defined
> entity?  Obviously I'm either ignorant or confused (or both :-).  

Or neither. Using math flow objects would require using a local set of
entity definitions so that  &agr; mapped to some element with content
being the unicode character for alpha, rather than just being a simple
character entity. Your stylesheet could then pick up this element and
use the math sequence flow object to render the character. As I said
before this is not ideal but it does in fact work on an oldish copy of
word running in windows95 without the multilingual extensions (I
checked:-)

David


 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist