Bring back the character map UI

This request is from SteveJohnson. I copied it to this new page (it had been entered in the EnhancementTemplate by mistake.

Summary

In WW versions before 9, there was a character map UI that enabled you to map symbol characters so they would output correctly in the help. With version 9, the UI was taken away and replaced by (somewhat) cryptic functionality that didn't appear to be documented anywhere. It took a support incident to get an answer.

Detailed Description

In December 2006 I ran across this. At the time, there was nothing on the Wiki (except a long, convoluted description of character mapping in general), nothing on TechNotes, and nothing in the user documentation or help.

In Frame, I define a variable named arrowright like so:

<Zsymbolfont>Æ<Default ¶ Font>

Zsymbolfont is a character tag that uses the Symbol font. As a result, the character outputs in Frame as a right-pointing arrow. However, in WW 9 help output, the character output as you see it there, as the "AE" character.

In WW versions prior to 9, I believe the solution was to define the character in the WW character map UI as an ASCII code but I don't remember offhand what the code was. In WW 9, there is no character map UI and the article I found on the Wiki was no help:

http://wiki.webworks.com/DevCenter/Documentation/CharacterMaps

I am not a programmer so this article looked like gibberish to me and anyway, it's vast overkill for the simple problem I was trying to solve. I ended up asking Support for a solution which turned out to be to create or edit mapentrysets.xml and add this stuff to it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<MapEntrySets xmlns="urn:WebWorks-XSLT-Extension-Document">
 <!-- Common HTML character entity names -->
 <!--                                    -->
 <MapEntrySet name="common">
  <MapEntry match="&#160;">&amp;nbsp;</MapEntry>
  <MapEntry match="&#8194;">&amp;nbsp;</MapEntry>
  <MapEntry match="&#8195;">&amp;nbsp;</MapEntry>
  <MapEntry match="&#198;">&#8594;</MapEntry>
 </MapEntrySet>
</MapEntrySets>

I'm pretty sure the entry I added was:

  <MapEntry match="&#198;">&#8594;</MapEntry>

(BTW, what I added to MapEntry was "$#8594;")

It's unfathomable to me why, if you elected to drop the character map UI, you didn't document this properly. I think the UI ought to be brought back but if that's impossible, document it so I don't have to get frustrated and then open a support incident on it. (I wasn't charged for the incident BTW and it was answered quickly but I should not have had to ask.)

If You are Using Symbol Font

If you are using the Symbol font in Framemaker for your bullets, you can open the Paragraph Designer and copy the bullet from Framemaker into Webworks. Cut from Framemaker and past into the Text field on the Paragraph's Bullet page. This solution was offered by Support.

Use Cases

ResumeWriter

You aren't kidding. I'm sure the heck not gonna buy this product without this UI. I'm on the fence with ePublisher vs. Madcap Flare, and not having this UI doesn't help. Heck, I don't want to spend my limited time adding map entries manually. I don't even know where to start.

2008-06-18 18:31:26