By tweaking some options in the configuration file
(search_results_wrapper et al.) and providing XML
templates it is possible to create XML output instead
of HTML output. However, XML does not like SGML
entities (unless the entity map is included in the
results template). I have created a patch which
introduces a new configure option (output_format). With
this option set to "xml", the higher bit characters are
left untouched, so the XML parser recognizes them (if
the charset is set to ISO-8859-1).
The solution in the patch is not optimal, but should work.
Patch for XML support in htdig-3.2.0b3