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We are creating documentation for out .NET projects using Sandcastle and SHFB. Basically, this works.

Unfortunately we are using .NET with a German language pack (and this shall stay this way ;-)), but apparently SHFB has a problem when loading .NET's very own XML files with the German umlauts.

What we get is an exception thrown by the XmlParser, as it seems, it is not capable to read the files correctly (although the encoding inside the file is set to UTF8). The problem is that these files are not under our control, they are being created by Microsoft.

A possible solution may be to uninstall the German language pack for .NET, but first of all this is more a workaround than a solution, and second the uninstaller warns us that "one or more products my stop working" ... and this is a little too critical just to try it out.

Is there an official solution to this?

Tomasz Nurkiewicz
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Golo Roden
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1 Answers1

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I´m not sure if this solves your problem, but you can try to use the numerical representation of a umlaut.

Taken from the Sandcastle Help File Builder page:

When using entities to represent special characters in the XML language resource files or in the header text, copyright text, etc, use the numeric form rather than the name form as the XML parser will not recognize them and will throw an exception. For example, if you specify Ä (Latin capital letter A with diaeresis) an exception will be generated. To fix it, use the numeric form instead (& #196;). This also applies to symbols such as © in the copyright text. Instead, you should use & #169; to get the copyright symbol.

Note: Whitespace between & and # was inserted by me, to avoid formatting.

See here the numerical representation of characters

Jehof
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  • Basically, this does not solve the problem, as we would need to pre-process all of .NET's own XML files (which should be Microsoft's task, not our ;-)). – Golo Roden Nov 21 '12 at 11:30
  • @Golo Roden: Basically you are right. But there seems to be no support from Microsoft in form of LanuagePacks for Sandcastle – Jehof Nov 21 '12 at 11:45