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Re: Symbol Font or HTML Entity?

Michael, I don't know anything about how to get the Mac OS 9 Help Viewer to
display the HTML entities, or get Mac OS X to display the Symbol font data.
Hopefully someone can provide a fix or workaround for this.

But if I assume that you cannot get an easy fix to work and that you must
have a single Help system for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, I think your best
alternative would be to use the Webworks Publisher character mapping feature
to substitute a graphic of each character for each Symbol font code. (The
character mapping feature would allow you -- for the Symbol font only -- to
convert each Symbol code into a character entity or into a graphic.)

It would be a bit of up-front work to create all the graphics and get the
mapping working, but you could continue to use Symbol characters as you have
been in FrameMaker so your print and PDF output will look good. Every time
you need to create the Help system, Webworks would insert the replacement
graphics, and you would not have to insert the symbol graphics into your
FrameMaker files.

I assume you also have a separate Webworks project for outputting Help for
Windows? Since the character entities work fine on Windows, you could also
set up the character mapping in this Webworks project to convert the Symbol
characters into character entities.

If it's OK to create separate Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Help systems and you
want to avoid creating and using all these character graphics, another
alternative would be to have separate Webworks projects for Mac OS 9 and Mac
OS X. The Mac OS X project would map the Symbol characters to HTML entities,
and the Mac OS 9 project would retain the Symbol fonts that work on that OS.
(However, two Help systems can open a host of additional issues, such as QA
testing two Help systems, multiple links to support context sensitivity, and
who knows what else.)

You can find a lot of information about the character mapping feature by
searching the Webworks Users Yahoo Group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wwp-users/

Good luck!

-Russ

> Subject: Symbol Font or HTML Entity?
> From: Michael Hecht <email@hidden>
> To: Apple Help <email@hidden>
>
> 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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