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Symbol Font or HTML Entity?

Our HTML Help contains many mathematical and Greek symbols, describing
statistical formulas. In the past, these were encoded using the Symbol
font. This worked well on Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X up until
Jaguar.

In Mac OS X 10.2 and later, the HTML Viewer engine does not honor the
request to display the Symbol font data. (Or maybe it does, but the
Symbol font is in Unicode now.) It was recommended that we switch over
to using HTML Entities for these symbols. That is, rather than coding

<font face="Symbol">p</font>

we instead code the named HTML entity

&pi;

for the %p character, for example. I wrote a nifty Perl script to
post-process the HTML source. It takes the text enclosed within a <font
face="Symbol"> tag and converts it to the appropriate entities (as
defined here: <URL:http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/demos/symbol.html>).

The result works great on Mac OS X 10.2, and on Windows! On X it now
even uses the Unicode characters for the symbols, without having to
switch fonts. Unfortunately, now Mac OS 9 Help cannot display the named
entities. We have also tried numeric entities to no avail. Having
separate help for 9 and X is not feasible for us.

Further details: We are using the one-two punch of FrameMaker and
WebWorks to produce our online help, PDF documentation, and printed
documentation from a single source. Directly editing the HTML is
difficult to fit into this process, but not impossible, obviously.

Any suggestions on how to get these symbols appearing for all three
OSes (other than using inline GIFs)?

--Michael

--
Michael P. Hecht email@hidden
JMP, a Business Unit of SAS Institute http://www.jmp.com/
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