Re: xml -> htmlhelp and character 8220

Allin Cottrell wrote:

> There isn't.  HTML output is implicit in context, and up till now I have 
> let the output encoding be implicit too (given that we're generating 
> HTML help for Windoze).  The input encoding is specified in the input 
> xml files.
Output encoding for HTML Help couldn't be implicit as HTML Help is very 
buggy piece of software. It doesn't support UTF-8 or character entity 
references so all characters must be written raw in some single-byte 
encoding. For Western-European languages the most appropriate encoding 
is windows-1252 -- it contains both dashes and quotes. So in your case 
you should have following settings:
<xsl:param name="htmlhelp.encoding" select="'windows-1252'"/>
<xsl:param name="chunker.output.encoding" select="'windows-1252'"/>
<xsl:param name="saxon.character.representation" select="'native'"/>

In most cases documents can be in UTF-8, so you can change second line to:

<xsl:param name="chunker.output.encoding" select="'UTF-8'"/>

> Thanks very much for your help.  But I'm coming to the conclusion this 
> is a bug (or at least a feature regression) in the xsl stylesheets.  It 
> seems that any required character re-encoding should be implicit from 
> the context
>   iso-8859-1 xml input -> Windows html help output
>
> and should be handled correctly without the user having to specify up to 
> 4 encoding variables.  And this did happen OK with the earlier release 
> of the stylesheets.
This is not possible, bacause it will be very hard to select proper 
encoding automatically (without having hardwired character repertoires 
for each encoding inside stylesheets). You must use different 
single-byte encodings for different languages depending on fancy 
characters appearing in titles that go to project files (.hhc, .hhk, .hhp).
You should blame MS for not supporting Unicode in HTML Help. But it is 
waste of time, because HTML Help was frozen long time ago, MS Help 2 is 
only for Visual Studio.NET and next help system will be available in 
Longhorn (which release data is constantly shifting).
                                Jirka
        (author of HTML Help output in DocBook stylesheets)

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