Document Types > Entities Support > Defining Non-Default Characters as Character Entities
  
Defining Non-Default Characters as Character Entities
To use words and phrases from a language other than the language of your native authoring environment when that language contains characters not in the default system alphabet, use character entities. They must be defined using entity declarations in your DTD or in a document's own internal subset.
You can also use parameter entities to define character entities for an entire ISO character set with just one entity declaration. Parameter entities — referencing entity declaration files in the Arbortext Editor online help describes this process.
1. Insert the desired entity declaration(s) in the DTD. There are two ways to do this:
◦ Insert individual character entities, one for each character you need.
◦ Insert a single parameter entity to reference an Arbortext Editor.gml file which contains the entity declarations for an entire character set.
This table shows which .gml file to use for a given character set:
Character entity declaration files
Language
.gml file
Language
ee.gml File
English (U.S.)
iso-lat1.gml
Italian
iso-lat1.gml
English (British)
iso-lat1.gml
Latvian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Bulgarian
iso-cyr1.gml and iso-cyr2.gml
Lithuanian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Catalan
iso-lat1.gml
Norwegian (Bokmal)
iso-lat1.gml
Croatian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
iso-lat1.gml
Czech
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Polish
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Danish
iso-lat1.gml
Portuguese (Brazilian)
iso-lat1.gml
Dutch
iso-lat1.gml
Portuguese (Continental)
iso-lat1.gml
Estonian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Romanian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Finnish
iso-lat1.gml
Russian (Cyrillic)
iso-cyr1.gml
French (Standard)
iso-lat1.gml
Serbian
iso-cyr1.gml and iso-cyr2.gml
French (Canadian)
iso-lat1.gml
Slovak
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
German
iso-lat1.gml
Slovenian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
German (Swiss)
iso-lat1.gml
Spanish
iso-lat1.gml
Greek
iso-grk1.gml and iso-grk2.gml
Swedish
iso-lat1.gml
Hungarian
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Turkish
iso-lat1.gml and iso-lat2.gml
Icelandic
iso-lat1.gml
Ukrainian
iso-cyr1.gml and iso-cyr2.gml
2. For each .gml file you reference in your DTD with a Public Identifier, make an entry in your catalog file.
3. Optional: Map key combinations for your character entities. There are already key combinations for the ISO 8859–1 and –2 (ISO Latin 1 and 2) character sets. See Keyboard shortcuts in the Arbortext Editor online help for the keyboard shortcuts for these characters.
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In addition to the .gml files required for language support, you might want to have an entity declaration in your DTD referencing the iso-num.gml file. This gives you character entities for many special characters such as the yen (¥), pound (£), and copyright (©) symbols.