Numeric character references for custom fonts

[stephgl]

Hi there,

I'm working on an end-user installed WebHelp for a software IDE, in Flare 6. The software installer loads a custom font on the user's machine. Accessing the Help through the software opens an encapsulated instance of the browser window (IE, since the software is Windows-dependent). So, it is a for-sure thing that the end user has the custom font available to the Help.

There are a few characters in this font set that are not rendering properly; they come up as boxes, dashes, or question marks.

Does Madcap support the use of numeric character references, in decimal or hexidecimal, as described here? I can't seem to get it to work, so I may be doing it wrong.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html

Or, is there some other way to get these glyphs to show up, given that it's guaranteed the custom font is resident on the user's machine and associated with the user's browser?

Thanks much,

[stephgl]

Okay, I figured out how to do this using the "Select 'Quick Character'... " dialog each time and entering the unicode value from the font set. (I am already working within pre class tags that name the font set). A mite tedious but a solution that appears to be working. Funny, once I define a quick character, I see a seemingly unrelated value in the unicode field next time I open the dialog, and not the one i entered last time. Anyone know what that is?

When I view the topic in Notepad, the correct characters are displayed. I expected to see some inserted code along the lines of &#xHHHH; instead. That would actually have been easier, since our software engineer could have written a utility to insert the code automatically as part of the copy-paste process for program listings. He's already made a great utility that allows me to copy a program listing out of our IDE, click an exe, and then paste over a set of p tags in the topic opened in Notepad. The utility automatically adds the appropriate pre tags based on the code listing content so I have code block background shading, and replaces all >, <, and & with the character references. Yes I am spoiled!

If there is an easier way to handle all these special characters going forward without having to redefine the quick-character each time, please let me know! But for now I'm glad for a way to keep moving.