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Re: more encoding woe

Subject: Re: more encoding woe
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 13:08:21 +0100
dotless j character

> I need the symbols for the following character entities to appear in my
> output - Ive looked up their encoding (ISO 9573-13) and used that (in
> <meta>), but all I get is the usual box... I know David Carlisle knows
> his mathML so hopefully he will have come across these before :) 
> ...
>   <node>aleph - &#8501;</node>

ISO 9573-13 isn't a character encoding it's just a set of _names_ for
characters. Someone else (me, as it happens) has to specify the mapping
from those names to unicode values.

There's lot more on these characters at my characters page
http://www.w3.org/Math/characters.

While it may seem pedantic in the end it's less confusing if you use the
right terminology for the right things.


XML does not have "character entities". SGML did, but they were thrown
out in the simplification of SGML that is XML. XML only has general
enities (and parameter entities which are different again).
This causes problems for the old SGML character sets such as the names
in ISO 9573-13. In SGML they were defined as character entities using
the SDATA entity type. This means effectively they were just given a
name and the system was supposed to just know what to do with those
names. XML got rid of these magic entity references so in XML you have
to define the entity to be something, typically a unicode character.
Unfortunately Unicode doesn't have enough characters to support the ISO
entity names sensibly. (It's hard to think of a good definition of
&jnodot; when Unicode does not have a dotless j character (even though
all mathematical fonts do have a dotless j glyph) The current tables at the
above page map &jnodot; to "j" which misses something in translation..)

So if you want these characters to work (out of the box) you'll need to
make sure you have installed a unicode font that includes mathematics.
Ie not ony has the correct glyphs but has the internal font table that
puts these glyphs in unicode order.

Alternatively if you mark up your document as mathML then a MathML
renderer will itself map these unicode numbers to the fonts it has
available, even if those fonts are not Unicode fonts (as typically they
won't be.) Mozilla and Netscape will understand MathML natively, and IE6
will if you get the free MathPlayer add on from Design Science.


David

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