Thanks for the follow-up suggestions.
Feeling my way around 'appropriate use' issues. If my primary goal were fine
mathematical typesetting I should probably be learning TeX. But I want a
simple markup for contributors, that magazine volunteers can enrich and
correct, that will stay reasonably human-readable, and that our website can
turn into HTML. As far as I've been able to work it out, that means XML,
with DocBook the obvious schema by a country mile.
So I've decided instead to set math elements very simply.
From
for all values of <i>n</i> in the lower range, <i>k</i> is…
not
for all values of
<inlineequation><mathphrase>n</mathphrase></inlineequation> in the lower
range, <inlineequation><mathphrase>k</mathphrase></inlineequation> is…
but
for all values of n in the lower range, k is…
So far the results look acceptable, if a little austere.
Stephen
2008/9/14 Andy Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 2008/9/11 Stephen Taylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > 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
>
