Re: DAVENPORT: I Can't Write--Without My Em-Dash

[Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk>]

On Mon, Aug 09, 1999 at 02:21:12PM -0500, Bob Van Valzah wrote:
> I've found that — will give me a real em-dash with the print back
> end. However, there doesn't seem to be an — entity defined in the
> HTML stylesheet--I just get my same old — showing up in the HTML.

It's a bug in most HTML browsers.

We worked around this on the FreeBSD Doc. Project by creating our own
superset of the DocBook DTD.  This superset contains explicit definitions
of a number of entities, if, and only if, the output.html parameter entity
is set to "INCLUDE".  Any time we produce HTML output using Jade (or similar
tools), "-i output.html" is added to the command line.

A bare bones DTD to do this would look like

<!-- =============================================================== -->
<!ENTITY % output.html  "IGNORE">
<!ENTITY % output.print "IGNORE">

<![ %output.html; [
<!ENTITY ldquo "``">
<!ENTITY rdquo "''">
<!ENTITY mdash "---">
<!ENTITY ndash "--">
<!ENTITY hellip "...">
<!ENTITY dollar "$">
]]>

<!ENTITY % orig-docbook PUBLIC "-//OASIS/DTD DocBook V3.1//EN">
%orig-docbook;
<!-- =============================================================== -->

If you don't want to create a whole new DTD then you can just include
the <![ %output.html; [ ... ]]> section in the internal DTD in your 
documents.

N
-- 
 [intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
 non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
 the links.
    -- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@cs.colorado.edu>