[xep-support] Characters not appearing

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Wendell,

> My XML source contains some characters that don't appear in the 
> PDF output, since they don't appear in the base font.
>
> Do I have to find a way to switch fonts to get, e.g. the "right arrow"
> (x2192) character to appear? The file symbol.fo in the distribution shows
> me examples of this.

Yes, current XEP design requires that you switch the font. However, for the
particular case of isolated math symbols scattered throughout the regular
text, the problem can be efficiently solved by XSLT means. Attached 
is a sample preprocessor stylesheet that wraps each character from 
the AdobeSymbol charset into an inline with an appropriate font. 
You can extend it, adding more fonts to process other special 
characters.

Comments:

1. The stylesheet shall be applied to ready FO documents, before they are
fed to XEP. No manual markup is needed at the source.

2. Only text nodes inside fo:page-sequences are selected 
for processing. This is done to preserve eventual bookmarks 
(stored in rx:outline that is a sibling of fo:page-sequences):
bookmarks are plain text, and don't need font switching.

3. DeepX people took this approach when doing proceedings 
for the last edition of XML Europe. They used Lucida Sans Unicode
for math.

Regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX


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