Re: [Docutils-develop] Enhancement: Make the parser obey custom roles

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2010-12-16, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
> This is one extension we implemented at Project Gutenberg.

> Rationale:

> In some books emphasis is not rendered as italics, eg. in old German 
> books emphasis is rendered as g e s p e r r t.

Objection:

Docutils uses *semantic markup*. Whether emphasis is rendered in
italic font, bold, coloured, or gesperrt is up to the style sheet.

So, instead of customizing the markup, I recommend to customize the
stylesheets (a CSS rule for <em> for HTML output,
\renewcommand*{\emph} for LaTeX, ...)

> We want to be able to redefine the role :emphasis: so as to render in 
> gesperrt. Like this::

>     .. role:: emphasis(emphasis)
>        :class: gesperrt

> But in the current implementation the custom role above works only if we 
> write :emphasis:`this`. That is awkward.

> We want to be able to still write *this* and have the custom role to 
> take effect.

You can also use the "default-role" directive::

    .. role:: gesperrt(emphasis)
    .. default-role:: gesperrt
    
to get gesperrten Text with `this`.

However, you will need a style sheet for gesperrten Text anyway.

If you want to keep a record about the "implementation" of emphasized text,
how about giving the document a generic class-attribute like::

  .. class:: em-gesperrt

and writing in the CSS stylesheet

  div.document.em-gesperrt em {
    ...;
    }

(untested).

Günter