Breaking of footnote with pifont in alternative4ht helpers4ht

Question

The last update of alternative4ht, in order to fix the tables in tex4ht see here, has a consequence that the redefinition of \thefootnote with pifont is broken. there are two versions of the redefinition, as explained here. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/133268/93524

both versions are broken : there is no longer the adequate symbol printed. it s a some vertical bar which is printed, instead of the numbers.

Note that the the command \renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\roman{footnote}} still works, so the problem is with pifont+alternative4ht

This behavior does not appear with the PREVIOUS version of alternative4ht dated 31/12/15, the version which has the problems with tabular.

note that if the packages \usepackage{alternative4ht} and the others are disabled, then the footnote works.

I compile with make4ht -ul hello.tex "fn-in"

I use an extension of tex4ht by @michal.h21,

https://github.com/michal-h21/helpers4ht

\documentclass[oneside,a4paper, 12pt]{article}


\usepackage[bottom, hang, perpage]{footmisc}



%%%\usepackage{pifont}\renewcommand\thefootnote{\scriptsize{\ding{\numexpr171+\value{footnote}}}}


%\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{\roman{footnote}} 


\usepackage{pifont}
\makeatletter
\newcommand*{\circnum}[1]{%
  \expandafter\@circnum\csname c@#1\endcsname
}
\newcommand*{\@circnum}[1]{%
  \ifnum#1<1 %
    \@ctrerr
  \else
    \ifnum#1>20 %
      \@ctrerr
    \else
      \ding{\numexpr 171+(#1)\relax}%
    \fi
  \fi
}
\makeatother

\renewcommand*{\thefootnote}{\circnum{footnote}}





 \usepackage{alternative4ht}
  \altusepackage{fontspec}
  \setmainfont{TeX Gyre Termes}
%%%  \newfontfamily\greekfont{Linux Libertine O}
%%%  \newfontfamily\russianfont{Linux Libertine O}
%%%  \newfontfamily\hindifont{Siddhanta}
  \altusepackage{polyglossia}
  \setmainlanguage{french}
%%  \setotherlanguage{czech}
%%  \setotherlanguage{greek}
%%  \setotherlanguage{russian}
%%  \setotherlanguage{hindi} 
%\usepackage{zref-perpage}
%\zmakeperpage{footnote}



\begin{document}
\footnote{First}
\dots
\addtocounter{footnote}{18}
\footnote{Last}
% \footnote{Error}
\newpage
\footnote{New page}
\end{document}

Answer 1

This problem is interesting, you want to use 8-bit font, which doesn't use unicode to output the characters. It works in normal tex4ht using transforming characters through htf conversion tables, but our Lua callback converts each character above ASCII value 128 to unicode char and obeys htf conversion process.

As a solution, only explicitly allowed fonts are processed by Lua callback now. Basic fonts such as cmrm are enabled by default, the disabled ones are printed to the terminal output:

Unsupported font  pzdr

fonts which should be processed with the callback can be enabled using

\Configure{AllowFont}{font pattern)

Please update helpers4ht to get these changes.

Modified sample result: