On 2013-08-13 17:27-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote: > Also, according to documentation available on the web, xml is almost > completely (with just a few necessary exceptions) utf8 aware so I have tried > the > experiment of inserting the utf8 code for a gamma (e.g., "γ" if your > mailer is utf8 aware) right into math.xml and > > xmlto --with-fop pdf plplotdoc.xml > > filled out the appropriate bit of Table-3.4 in the resulting > plplotdoc.pdf with no issues. So this constitutes a proof-of-concept > that numerical entities such as "γ" (or the equivalent decimal > equivalent "γ") that define the "γ" entity in math.ent > could be replaced by the utf8 code for gamma, "γ" and so on for > all the other Greek letters.
Replacing all numerical entities in math.ent with their utf8 equivalents made no difference to the xmlto approach. pdf and ps worked fine, and dvi errored out just as before for --with-dblatex, --with-fop, or with neither. (I presume dvi would have worked (lamely) if I had used Math symbols since those are out of the range which is recognized and therefore avoid the entity issues that seem to bedevil dvi right now.) xmllint validation continued to work. This change did make a major difference to the SGML approach; onsgmls blew its little mind trying to figure out utf8. The complaints concerned invalid SGML characters. The other drawback of the utf8 approach is it is hard to visually distinguish between say the Greek alpha and the equivalent math symbol (which have very different unicode indices). But the math symbol turns into a missing glyph for PDF and PostScript (remember the severe limitation in the range of glyphs that are available for Type 1 fonts) while the Greek letter does not. So it is best from the point of view of being as definite as possible to continue using the numerical entities in math.ent, but nevertheless it was an interesting experiment. My next step is to look at generating our info documentation using the xmlto approach. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get 100% visibility into Java/.NET code with AppDynamics Lite! It's a free troubleshooting tool designed for production. Get down to code-level detail for bottlenecks, with <2% overhead. Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48897031&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
