I believe if you look at the rendered output in HTML, you will find that the emphasis element produces the <em> element in HTML and that emphasis with a role of strong produces a <strong> element in HTML. While other roles do work, the idea in DocBook was to say "This needs emphasis" or "This needs strong emphasis" and have the stylesheets handle doing the right thing with the render.
Once the HTML standard evolved to the point that semantic rather than typographic styles were available, the DocBook stylesheets move to using them, too. In general, it is preferable to use emphasis and emphasis with a role of strong to stay in the semantic arena and let the stylesheets determine what is appropriate in the output being rendered (for example, our Japanese localizers do not like bold for strong emphasis -- it distorts the symbols too much, so we have modified the stylesheets). While there are situations where it is desirable to directly control the text enhancements used on a set of characters (such as when you are describing the way text is displayed in a GUI) I have found them few and far between and stick with the emphasis and emphasis with a role of strong in almost everything I do using DocBook. It also made my HTML better, since the accessibility folks say to use the semantic tags instead of the typographic ones, too. Regards, Larry Rowland -----Original Message----- From: cavicchio_...@emc.com [mailto:cavicchio_...@emc.com] Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 8:55 AM To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: [docbook] italics (was RE: WELCOME to docbook@lists.oasis-open.org) Thomas Anderson [mailto:zeln...@gmail.com] wrote: > quoting <http://www.ibiblio.org/godoy/sgml/docbook/howto/writing-docbook.html>: "a. The text can be enphasized in a few ways. The most common ways are italics and bold. DocBook, however, supports only italics. The use of bold requires additional settings on the stylesheet used." If DocBook supports italics, how do I do it? Certainly I can do <phrase role="italic">...</phrase>, but the above seems to be implying that that's not necessary? < Interesting statement, that DocBook "supports" only italics. DocBook itself does not directly define or handle any inline formatting, so this must be referring to what the DocBook stylesheets support. I was under the impression that all of the following worked in the standard transforms: <emphasis role="bold"></emphasis> <emphasis role="italic"></emphasis> <emphasis role="underline"></emphasis> Of course, that said, you should consider whether it is appropriate to explicitly specify formatting in your source document. (It rarely is, IMO.) ************************* Rob Cavicchio Principal Technical Writer EMC Captiva EMC Corporation 10145 Pacific Heights Boulevard, 6th Floor San Diego, CA 92121-4234 P: (858) 320-1208 F: (858) 320-1010 E: cavicchio_...@emc.com The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-h...@lists.oasis-open.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-h...@lists.oasis-open.org