problem with fop <literal> and soft-hyphen

Hi all,
   We have tables of special characters and the key sequences needed to 
get them.

For example:
   Multi_key plus plus		= "#" numbersign
   Multi_key apostrophe space	= "'" apostrophe

...
<row><entry><keycombo 
action='seq'><keysym>Multi_key</keysym><keysym>plus</keysym><keysym>plus</keysym></keycombo></entry><entry>"<literal>#</literal>" 
numbersign</entry></row>
<row><entry><keycombo 
action='seq'><keysym>Multi_key</keysym><keysym>apostrophe</keysym><keysym>space</keysym></keycombo></entry><entry>"<literal>'</literal>" 
  apostrophe</entry></row>
...


This works fine, except for one thing.   When fop tries to process a 
soft-hyphen,  &#173;,  it dies.

I've read that this is an known issue.
I did notice that removing the <literal> tag fixes things. IE:
<literal>&#173;</literal>
->
&#173;

works.

My question is:

1)  Is there a preferred tag for displaying characters in a document?
1a)  If not, is there a customization for fixing the literal issue or 
should I just remove that tag?

thanks,
Matt