On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 13:59, Lisa Girard wrote: > How can I get italic text within the DocBook templates?
Hussein replied: > Select the text as usual and convert it to element <emphasis>. Lisa, as Hussein mentioned, converting to 'emphasis' would generally result in your text being italicized; however, keep in mind that DocBook doesn't really have a sense of 'physical style markup'. DocBook is much more structure oriented. I went to the first page Google returned for "when to use italics" (http://teenwriting.about.com/library/weekly/aa120102a.htm) and came up with the following mapping to docbook elements. Title of a referenced work: citetitle A set of foreign words: foreignphrase Emphasized words: emphasis Direct quote: probably best to use "quote" or "blockquote", which by default will generally put the quote into quotation marks, but with the use of a 'role' tag, you could change how these particular elements in your document would get rendered through a stylesheet customization. Prologues, Interludes and More: I'm not entirely certain about this one. I'd probably use a "section" element with a role and customize the output in a stylesheet Additionally, if the words your italicizing are not one of the above, but represent something else that has a DocBook element defined for it (say for example, an 'abstract') which isn't ordinarily italicized, then you could always override the style sheet with your own custom rendering. If there is no defined element that matches your text, your would generally then wrap your words in a 'phrase' element with a 'role' attribute and apply a style to that role in a stylesheet. I realize this reply is perhaps on the pedantic side, but I didn't feel comfortable with the thread ending with a message that implied equality between emphasis and italics. -- William
