[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]
Subject: Re: [docbook] Bold and italic type for mathematics
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 <i> and <b> 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
[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index] | [List Home]