Re: [docbook] Bold and italic type for mathematics

Thanks for the follow-up suggestions.

Feeling my way around 'appropriate use' issues. If my primary goal were fine mathematical typesetting I should probably be learning TeX. But I want a simple markup for contributors, that magazine volunteers can enrich and correct, that will stay reasonably human-readable, and that our website can turn into HTML. As far as I've been able to work it out, that means XML, with DocBook the obvious schema by a country mile.

So I've decided instead to set math elements very simply.

From

for all values of n in the lower range, k is…

not

for all values of <inlineequation><mathphrase>n</mathphrase></inlineequation> in the lower range, <inlineequation><mathphrase>k</mathphrase></inlineequation> is…

but

for all values of n in the lower range, k is…

So far the results look acceptable, if a little austere.

Stephen

2008/9/14 Andy Smith <andy.docbook@zambezi.org.uk>

2008/9/11 Stephen Taylor <sjt@5jt.com>:

> Mathematicians commonly use bold and italic type to distinguish
> single-character terms. Eg
>
> P(n) = {x = (x0, x1, …) | …
>
> When typesetting in HTML it has seemed OK to me to use the otherwise
> deprecated and tags for this.
> Does DocBook have suitable elements?

A couple of other ideas besides what's been suggested so far:

Unicode has code points for mathematical alphanumeric symbols in
various styles - bold, italic, bold italic, script, bold script,
fraktur, bold fraktur, double struck (aka blackboard bold), sans
serif, bold sans serif, italic sans serif, bold italic sans serif, and
monospaced. These code points are in the range U+1D400 to U+1D7FF. If
you use these characters in your DocBook markup, and your equations
are rendered in a font with appropriate glyphs, you should get the
desired presentation however you mark up your mathematical notation.
However if you're outputting HTML you can't guarantee your readers
will have fonts with these glyphs, unless it's just for private use.

Another option is to use MathML. In MathML you can use the
mathematical alphanumeric Unicode characters, or you can get the same
effect with the 'mathvariant' attribute for 'mi' and other elements.
For instance <mi mathvariant="double-struck">R</mi> is one way to
represent the set of real numbers.

The problem with using MathML is that it might be difficult to get it
to render as you want in the output, depending on what FO processor
you're using for printed output, or whether you want HTML output to be
readable in browsers without MathML support. I haven't tried using
MathML with DocBook but there's some info here:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/MathML.html

As that page says, it might help to convert your MathML to SVG or
another image format. I guess you could do that as a preprocessing
step before applying the style sheets. There's a list of conversion
programs here:

http://www.w3.org/Math/Software/mathml_software_cat_converters.html

Andy

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