Re: [docbook] Bold and italic type for mathematics

Warren, thanks for the lengthy and detailed reply.

I have adapted your suggestions and have them working.

Some reservations:

Math phrases occur in the body text of articles, as in references to a value n. I'm converting a production process which has been HTML>Word>PDF to DocBook>PDF&HTML. So my markup has gone from <i>n</i> to <inlineequation><mathphrase>n</mathphrase></inlineequation>.
Though I've done it for the time being, it isn't my aim to set all Common Math Notation in italic type, only specific terms (The italic glyphs for Greeks and braces look a little off.)

Best

Stephen Taylor

2008/9/11 Warren Young <warren@etr-usa.com>

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">

<xsl:import href=""http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunkfast.xsl"/>


<xsl:param name="html.stylesheet" select="'foo.css'"/>


<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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