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Subject: Re: [docbook] Bold and italic type for mathematics
Stephen Taylor wrote: > Mathematicians commonly use bold and italic type to distinguish > single-character terms. Eh, I see more plain italics than bold-italics. > Does DocBook have suitable elements? No, but they're not necessary. DocBook has tags for declaring mathematics: http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/equation.html http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/informalequation.html http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/inlineequation.html http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/mathphrase.html To illustrate, here is a DocBook document showing one block-level equation, and one inline. You style them differently. ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.dbx ---------- 8< ---------- <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.5//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd"> <article> <para>Newton said:</para> <equation>F = ma</equation> <para> Einstein said, <mathphrase>E = mc<superscript>2</superscript></mathphrase>. </para> </article> ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.dbx ---------- 8< ---------- Just reading it, it's easy to imagine what this results in, yes? We haven't tried to style things here, only declare the semantic meaning of the document. Now we need a DocBook customization layer. Minimally: ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.xsl ---------- 8< ---------- <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <!-- Bring in standard stylesheet --> <xsl:import href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunkfast.xsl"/> <!-- Allow styling of HTML --> <xsl:param name="html.stylesheet" select="'foo.css'"/> <!-- Make 'math' phrases italic; from Stayton book, 4/e --> <xsl:template match="mathphrase"> <xsl:call-template name="inline.italicseq"/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.xsl ---------- 8< ---------- There's lots more you can add to this. I've cut down one of mine to show only the bits that are on-point here. It says that mathphrase tags are styled directly. We could perhaps do the same here for <equation>, but it isn't necessary. It's more elegant to do it in CSS: ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.css ---------- 8< ---------- div.equation-contents { font-style: italic; } ----------- 8< --------- cut here, foo.css ---------- 8< ---------- All this might look like a lot of text to avoid a few <i> tags, but it only has to be done once. Thereafter, you ignore it, and just write equations.
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