Re: Simulation Analysis in the User's guide - review needed

["J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" <fsmla xinara org>]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 09:25:56 -0700, Louis Luangkesorn wrote:
> 1.  Is there a possibility of having the docbook version for the Gnumeric
> documentation changed to 4.5?

I doubt it. Gnumeric's documentation is processed by a variety of tools
(depending on platform and type of use (viewing, printing, ...)) not all of
which support newer versions of DocBook.

> 2.  Is there a character entity set that includes greek letters that can
> be used?

As far as I can tell, they are already available by default, through
        http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/dbcentx.mod

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:40:50 +0200, Adrian Custer wrote:
> > 2.  Is there a character entity set that includes greek letters that can
> > be used?
>
> Wow, I don't even understand the question or the technology. I thought
> having UTF-8 was going to get us out of any character/font related
> trouble but apparently there's another mechanism for complex fonts.

UTF-8 or, rather, Unicode just gives you a larger space of characters to
work with which includes the Greek alphabet. It does not give you
author-friendly ways of referring to characters. So you can refer to a
lambda, but you do so through code point 0x03BB. As an analogy, think of IP
addresses.

What the entity mechanism in SGML/XML gives you is a way to declare/use
symbolic constants with author-friendly names for characters from the
Unicode space. E.g., by using/"importing" ISOgrk1.ent, you can use &lgr; for
lambda. In the analogy, this is DNS (or at least, a hosts file).

HTH,
Ray
-- 
"[...] you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want
to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go
work for a successful company."
        Jamie Zawinski in http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html