Re: XML-friendly hexadecimal references in Markup->Insert Entity?

> Has anyone come up with a way to have the Insert Entity menu under
> Markup insert the XML compliant hexadecimals (&#x[blah];) instead
> of character entities? 

I'm not 100% sure I understand the question. You want to be able to
select Markup > Insert Entity > mdash from the menu and have Emacs
insert "—" instead of "&mdash:"?

Insert Entity almost never works for me, as I usually have a
line-mode only interface and am accessing the menus via tmm. But when
I do use an X window, it does work -- I am shown a list of entity
names, and if I select one a reference to it is inserted. Reading the
code for sgml-entities-menu confirms this behavior. While it
shouldn't be too hard to change the behavior to do what you've asked,
I wouldn't call the resulting feature "Insert Entity", as "—"
is not a reference to the 'mdash' general entity, but rather a
reference to the Unicode code-point 8212, which is associated with the
character em dash.

Actually, that makes no sense at all. What is currently called
"Insert Entity" should be called "Insert Entity Reference". What you
are asking for (I think) is either a new functionality "Inert
Entity", where when you select an entity name from a pop-up, the
entity itself (i.e., the replacement text) is inserted; or a new
functionality "Insert Char Ref", which presents a list not of entity
names, but rather of the Unicode character names, and inserts a
numeric character reference to that character.

Neither of these would be all that hard to do, I don't think, but
developing some mechanism to determine which of the roughly 14,000
characters currently in ISO 10646 / Unicode (as of 3.2) to display is
the trick.

Am I barking up the right tree?


> I am pointing to a DTD (EAD) that does include xml entity sets
> (although the .pen file extension looks odd to me now).

Me too. I thought it would have been short for "parameter entities",
and would be used to declare a bunch of parameter (internal-DTD)
entities as opposed to general entities. But I have .pen files on my
system that declare general entities with numeric character
definitions, too.


I'm not sure if this will help, and I've never played with this
feature myself, but I think you can ask psgml to display that to
which an entity name is mapped (in a .map file) as opposed to the
entity itself or the reference itself. See the "Translating between
characters and entity references" section of the manual.

   C-h i m psgml RET m edit RET m tr TAB RET

if psgml is in your top-level info directory. (As it should be :-) 

Hope this helps.


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