Re: [docbook] Text and title figures

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi Stephen,

On Mittwoch, 27. August 2008, Stephen Taylor wrote:
> Some fonts offer both title and text figures (sometimes called "lining"
> and "non-lining"), analogous to upper and lower cases for alphabetics.
> Does docbook offer any semantics for distinguishing them?

As far as I know, not directly. For me, it seems like this is more a 
feature of your processing chain or target format than a task for 
DocBook. :)

However, if you really want to distinguish between normal figures and text 
(or old-style) figures you could use phrase, for example:

 <phrase role="oldstyle">12345</phrase>

Your XSLT customization layer must match for phrase with a role attribute 
and select for each number the alternative glyph. You need to know the 
Unicode codepoint of your old-style figures, so you can map the normal 
figures to the new ones. I'm not 100% sure if these codepoints are 
available in Unicode. Of course, the font has to support these 
figures. :)

Well, at least that's the theory, maybe there are other alternatives.


Good luck,
Tom

-- 
Thomas Schraitle