Re: Consistent handling of all purely presentational characters such a quotes, parenthesis, square brackets, slashes

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

> My current thinking leads me to overloading phrase element yet again
> and doing something like:
>
> <phrase rend="surround_with_parenthesis">2.5<phrase
> role="unit">in</phrase></phrase> (or http://pastie.org/3165754 )

Do you get imperial units both with and without the parenthetical
metric equivalents? If not, I think I'd be inclined to choose
some markup for the lengths and leave the rest to styling.

Depending on your back end, you might get away with simply:

  <length>2.5in</length>

It's not too difficult to break that into "2.5" and "in" from just the
text content. And it's not too hard (probably) to enumerate all the
valid length units and determine which are imperial and which are
metric.

You could go whole hog, I suppose:

  <length magnitude="2.5" units="inches" system="imperial">2.5in</length>

but that seems like it might be overkill :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | So, are you working on finding
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | that bug now, or are you leaving
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | it until later? Yes.

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