problem with special characters / entities

[Heinz, Chris]

Hey, I'm a noob here, so if anyone wants to point me to the archives of this 
mailing list to search for my problem, that's fine.

My problem is that I have three special characters being placed into formatted 
text:  return, non-breaking spaces, and soft hyphens.  I can input them as 

,  , and &#xAD.  The first two Xerces handles fine, the third I seem 
to be getting a standard hyphen???   But when I write them out, they go in as 
non-printing control characters.  Xerces can import those fine, so I can round 
trip, but, the non-printing characters aren't too user-friendly.

I have defined in my dtd file:

<!ENTITY return "&#x0D;">
<!ENTITY nbsp "&#xA0;">
<!ENTITY softhyphen "&#xAD;">

And tried &return;, etc, that didn't seem to work at all.

I've checked DomOptions and looked at DOMSerializer, haven't seen anything that 
looks like it would help.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Chris