Character references, entities, XSL and cocoon

[Charity Hope <chope@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Cross -posted to xml-l.  Please excuse the duplication.

Hello colleagues,

I'm creating an xml version of an art theory scholarly manuscript that
includes ancient greek characters (with breathing marks, accents, etc.)
I've run into some problems and would appreciate any help you could provide.
I decided to use unicode character references for the ancient greek
characters.  With IE5 (newly equipped with the Athena font) the characters
were successfully rendered on my screen using CSS (question 1 -- although
they would not print! why?).  However, I need to make this project
accessible to a broader audience than IE5 users, so I've begun work with
Cocoon, an Apache/Jserv servlet that will transform my XML into HTML using
XSLT.

Okay so far, but the character references in my xml document show up in the
transformed HTML document as entity references, not rendered greek.  (Some
character references show up as question marks -- is this the parser or
processor not able to recognize less common unicode characters?)  Anyway,
I'd very much appreciate help in understanding what's going on, and
information about how I can pass my XML character references to the
transformed HTML document.

Another, possibly related question: I can't seem to get entity references to
be rendered at all using cocoon.  Is there a problem with or strategy for
using entities in an xml document when the xml will be transformed by XSLT
(using cocoon)? (For example, do I need to declare entities in an internal
subset of the DTD, because XSL doesn't deal with external DTDs?)

I would very much appreciate any advice/feedback anyone can offer.  Thanks
very much in advance.

Charity Hope
Research Libraries Resident
UMass Amherst Libraries
chope@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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