RE: [Docutils-develop] Interpreted text for terms?

[Moore, P. <Pau...@at...>]

From: Benja Fallenstein [mailto:b.f...@gm...]
> As I said, I'm fine with this, but I just noticed a case I
> hadn't realized before and thought I'd pass it on. From one
> article-in-writing:
>
>   UML (the Unified Modeling Language) ... has become the *de
>   facto* industry-standard language for specifying, visualizing,
>   constructing, and documenting the products in software
>   engineering.
>
> It is pretty common to set this kind of term in italics in print
> publications, yet when asterisk-emphasing it, the meaning changes
> for me:

This raises an interesting issue. Asterisks mean *emphasis*, and
as such should not be used automatically where a printed rendering
of italic is intended. (The fact that the markup is often used in
naive plain-text markup to imply "bold" tends to exaggerate the
distinction). On the other hand, that's going to strengthen the case
for having a variety of specialist interpreted text roles...

Maybe it would be useful to have some form of general directive which
maps a role to specific markup (obviously writer-dependent). Something
like

    .. role:: term
       :html: <em>$text</em>

No idea how this would translate to other output formats - markup
like TeX or Docbook should be OK, but things like PDF could be
impossible...

Just a thought,
Paul.