Re: [docbook] Handling of ranges and measurement units (metric and imperial) and fractions

[Křištof Želechovski <giecrilj@stegny.2a.pl>]

Dnia wtorek, 8 marca 2011 o 21:27:21 Lech Rzedzicki napisał(a):
> Hi.
> 
> We have some decent ideas on how to handle units by following ISO etc,
> but Docbook doesn't really standardise that.
> 
> I am very interested in hearing from anyone who has had to capture any
> measurements with Docbook.
> I am interested in how did you capture units such as kilograms or
> pounds and whether you had to store equivalent metric and imperial
> measurements or did you convert when publishing.
> One other area that I am also bit puzzled about is how to consistently
> store ranges such as 2 - 5 kilograms - do you annotate such ranges in
> any way or do you just store them as plain text?
> Finally, how do you mark up fractions such as 1/3rd, ideally without
> going into the complexity of MathML?

Your desired result in HTML is 

  <SPAN CLASS="fraction" ><SUP CLASS="numerator" >1</SUP >&frasl;<SUB CLASS="denominator" >3rd</SUB ></SPAN >.  

It is entirely possible to typeset complex mathematics in HTML+CSS without recurring to MathML.  They will not look as professional but nevertheless quite decent (of course, the browser allowing; Wikipedia rejected my ideas because some readers were using retarded browsers).  Of course, it is still not practical to do it by hand, so you need a template system of some sort.  I used MediaWiki as my first attempt; I have been using XSLT since I was banned from WP.

HTH,
Chris