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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Non breaking spaces or "ties"?



sbline@club-internet.fr said:
:- I use the entity   for non-breaking space and it works fine. 

That is what I expected, except that I couldn't find that entity anywhere
in the DocBook DTD distribution or documentation.  Where is it defined?

:- As for hyphenation, I suppose you're referring only to print output
:- like pdf

Are non-hardcopy renderings prohibited from being hypenated?  I didn't
know that!

:- If you want a better granularity [on preventing hyphenation] (word-level)
:- you will have to rely on the renderer

Oh well.  Doesn't do much for document portability, does it?

I understand that DocBook is a semantic markup.  What I don't understand
is if *these* kinds of things are considered to be purely "presentational".
If they are then I can understand that there is no method for encoding
them in DocBook.  But that also seems to present formidable hurdles
for producing (what I would consider) truly high-quality (AKA "beautiful")
renderings of DocBook encoded texts in a portable way.  (Yes, I admit
I'm biased by almost two decades of experience with the typesetting
industry, and with TeX-related printing!)

Alternatively, I can imagine that with some kind of twisted thinking,
one could imagine there being a semantic of an "unbreakable phrase" or
a "non-hyphenated word".  Which is why I'm asking.  

[I admit I am a complete tyro at DocBook.  But I think this author-
encoded-semi-presentational thing is actually a generic issue, not
just a printing one.  Consider aural presentation of words that the
author wanted to have non-standard pronunciation: can DocBook encode
that?  Should it?  And while I know that DocBook is a *technical*
document encoding scheme, consider "The Sound and the Fury".  How
would Falkner, were he alive today, encode that in DocBook in such
a way that his *meanings* (i.e. semantics) are captured in the 
encoding portably?  Or is that completely out of the realm of semantic
markup schemes?]

I've seen some pretty outrageous typography from the current set of
XML DocBook tools (like major widows and orphans), but I'm guessing
much of that can be explained by their relative immaturity.  After
all, widows and orphans are (relatively) easy to deal with 
algorithmically.  But the things I'm talking about above are more
difficult to deal with, especially in the absence of explicit 
encoding by the author.

Thanks!

-- 
Robert Withrow -- (+1 978 288 8256, ESN 248)
BWithrow@NortelNetworks.com



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