Bug 99257 – Add dash entities to DTD

• Status: RESOLVED FIXED
• Product: [OLD] Docs-developer

[Description Alexey Chumakov (RETIRED) 2005-07-16 12:18:33 UTC]

Some national typography rules (e.g. Russian) require use of
Em dash or En dash characters. Although one can use their plain
value in UTF8, that's not a perfect way as not all editing tools
allow them to be entered.

A suggestion:
add one of the following definitions (or both) to *.dtd:

Option 1 (consistent with ISO/SGML ENSP/EMSP naming, but differs from ISO)
<!ENTITY endash "&#8211;"> <!-- en dash U+2013 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY emdash "&#8212;"> <!-- em dash U+2014 ISOpub -->

Option 2 (inconsistent, but ISO-8879:1986 compliant)
<!ENTITY ndash "&#8211;"> <!-- en dash U+2013 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY mdash "&#8212;"> <!-- em dash U+2014 ISOpub -->

//cay

[Comment 1 Alexey Chumakov (RETIRED) 2005-07-16 13:05:39 UTC]

Have tested in HTML: only one option is allowed:

<!ENTITY ndash "&#8211;"> <!-- en dash U+2013 ISOpub -->
<!ENTITY mdash "&#8212;"> <!-- em dash U+2014 ISOpub -->

Please include in DTD!

[Comment 2 Jan Kundrát (RETIRED) 2005-07-17 03:03:27 UTC]

IMHO good idea.  

[Comment 3 Xavier Neys (RETIRED) 2005-07-17 03:19:19 UTC]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Have tested in HTML: only one option is allowed:
Irrelevant

endash & emdash entities added to guide.dtd & book.dtd

[Comment 4 Alexey Chumakov (RETIRED) 2005-07-17 07:16:21 UTC]

Thank you Xavier!

For completeness it should be also added to inserts.dtd and metadoc.dtd.