Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Abbreviations and Ordinals

[ydirson@alcove.fr]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2001 at 04:31:13PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
> | 2. In German typography, ordinal numbers are indicated by a
> |    period after the corresponding cardinal number. Normally,
> |    you would want to have a smaller space after this period
> |    than after a period terminating a sentence. In TeX, you can
> |    achieve this by appending a backslash to the ordinal period.
> |    How would one cater for this using DocBook?
> 
>  , probably.

Hm... in TeX, doesn't "\ " give a normal space ?  Additionally, I
guess such things would better be done by the stylesheet, although I
can't think straightforwardly of an existing piece of markup for this.
Maybe something like `<phrase role="ordinal">6</>' that would be
rendered into "6. ", but that looks like overkill.

Or maybe the stylesheets could parse the text, and interpret stings
like "6. " as ordinals, and correct things appropriately ?  I don't
think that'd be good...

Maybe we should have some markup for those things that must have
special formatting.  An <ordinal> tag ?

-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Free-Software Engineer				      Ingénieur Logiciel-Libre
Free-Software time manager    	       Responsable du temps Informatique-Libre
Debian GNU/Linux developper <dirson@debian.org>