> > I am very much not up to date on the different character sets and coding > > systems available, but I was wondering about some advice for > emdash. AFAIK, > > there is no official '&symbol;' for emdash in HTML. Some HTML/XML type > > documents require it, and it seems to be '&emdash;' as the common usage. > > I think the canonical reference is > http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/entities.html.
Nice reference. I will keep it handy. > According to them, it's 'mdash' (—) for an emdash (code point > 0x2013). Endash is "ndash" (0x2014). Both of these are available as > characters in the standard Palm fonts: 0x96 and 0x97. > > > 2) A special character function code in viewer. Function code > for character > > followed by a number of the special character to output (in this case: > > Palm's emdash character (Harder. More of a pain for > international sets and > > to calculate line widths too perhaps?) > > I generally like this idea. Make the function code argument a > two-byte numeric value that contains the code point for the character. > > But we should really restrict this a lot in the parser, I think. > Remember that the viewer has to draw these special characters somehow. > > One idea that occurs to me is to only allow those special characters > that appear in what Palm calls PalmLatin; basically the characters > seen in the code chart at > http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1252.htm. These > characters would be easy to display on a Palm that uses the > "PalmLatin" character encoding, and on Windows machines -- just stick > in the Palm character code (in the viewer, not the parser). It's > probably also *possible* to display them on Mac and Unix boxes. They > also all have symbolic names assigned in that code entities.html > document pointed to above. Sounds very reasonable. Just want to design in a way that the same document is portable among different devices platforms like a Linux PDA, etc. For the chart, I don't think Palm has a right/left singlequote or right/left doublequote anywhere in their character sets, so just render these in parser as a normal ' and " ? Unfortunate that these r/l quotes aren't in, as it is more difficult to read a conveyed dialogue without them (such as Marlow's tale in "Heart of Darkness"). Could be handled yet though, perhaps one way would be: there are a few blank entries near the top of the Palm character sets. Could put r/l single quote, r/l double quotes as 4 entries in there in one of the custom fonts that ship with Plucker. Then when rendering, if two conditions are met (a) not in a large font and (b) in OS 3.0 or higher then set font to the custom font, output the quote and unset the font. If a large font or pre OS 3.0, just output a normal ' or ". Could support usage in large font too, by recycling whatever function is used to move characters up for superscripting, in order to move the r/l quotes to proper height in line. I don't know if all of those empty slots at the start of Palm character sets are kept empty there for a reason though? Best wishes, Robert
