DITA and XMetaL Discussion
XMetaL Community Forum › DITA and XMetaL Discussion › syntax for special characters
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mgharvey2 May 15, 2015 at 5:09 pm
syntax for special characters
May 15, 2015 at 5:09 pmParticipants 1Replies 2Last Activity 7 years, 10 months agoXMetal 8.0.1.051, DITA 1.2
I have to use two special characters in my text; infinity and lowercase tau.
q∞ looked like it was going to work, but XMetaL tells me I have invalid markup and no character shows up in the WebHelp output.
My heading looks like this:
What am I doing wrong?
barbwire May 18, 2015 at 6:13 am
Reply to: syntax for special characters
May 18, 2015 at 6:13 amI think you should not use HTML entities. Try to set the file encoding to UTF-8 and just write the correct symbol. For example ∞.
Derek Read May 21, 2015 at 8:54 pm
Reply to: syntax for special characters
May 21, 2015 at 8:54 pmThe DITA DTDs do not define any named character entities* (which is why you are being told the file is invalid as you are referencing an undefined entity). It is best to do as barbwire says and insert Unicode characters directly into the document.
*Note that this is not entirely true. The DITA DTDs define one named character entity but it is not recommended for use:
It was included in the original DTDs that IBM created and remains in all versions up to 1.3 but is marked as “deprecated” and will be removed in the 2.0 version of the DTDs. -
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