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Hello Mrs. Lewek,

special characters and custom markup are things that very often are not there out of the box when editing structured documents. In structured documents, formatting must happen automatically, and everything you see in FM must be convertible to some XML-stuff, so it can be read next time you open the xml.
If a feature precludes automatic formatting or roundtripping to and from xml, this feature cannot be used in xml.
Yet, you could try the following:
Special characters and underline are very often implemented as "character formats" in unstructured FM.
You can simulate character formats the following way:

1. look for an appropriate element to bind the behaviour to. E.g, if you want to simulate character formats in DITA, you could choose "ph". Which element you choose depends on the structure dialect you use.

2. look for an attribute in this element that may contain an arbitrary string (in dita, this attribute is most often "outputclass")

3. modify the EDD, so the attribute of the element does not accept arbitrary strings, but only a limited group. This group are the names of the "formats" you want to simulate (e.g. "underline" and "symbol").

4. For this element, add an attribute context that assigns "Text Range" and the character format that belongs to the attribute value,
e.g. character format "underline" for <ph outputclass="underline">

Warning: As long as you only assign font properties such as bold, underline a.s.o or symbol characters such as "symbol" or "zapfdingbat", everything is ok. If you use this to simulate "real text", you may only use fonts that are unicode. Otherwise encoding conversion will lead to rubbish in the xml.

If this sounds too complicated, you might think about taking some consulting. Hope this helps.

With kind regards,
Franz.

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