Section 36.3 Character Repertoire

By default these conversions use genuine Unicode characters: curly quotation marks, en- and em-dashes, an ellipsis, and so on. In the long tradition of plain text, you may elect 7-bit ASCII stand-ins instead (-- for an em-dash, straight quotes, (c) for a copyright symbol). The election is the @characters attribute of the <text> element of the publication file, with values unicode (the default) and ascii; see Section 45.9. It applies to both conversions, and the files are encoded as UTF-8 either way.