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

[David G. <go...@py...>]

Sorry for the long delay.  I didn't want to send this out before my
follow-up was ready, which it finally is.

[Benja Fallenstein]
> 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: The sentence seems to emphasize that this is the *de facto*,
> but *not* the real standard in SE (and I don't think any special
> emphasis on this point is intended).

I get your point.  Indeed, *emphasis* is not strictly correct for this
case.

[Paul Moore]
> This raises an interesting issue. Asterisks mean *emphasis*, and
> as such should not be used automatically where a printed rendering
> of italic is intended.

Very true.

> (The fact that the markup is often used in naive plain-text markup
> to imply "bold" tends to exaggerate the distinction).

Just to clarify: what markup do you mean?  I assume single-asterisks
as bold.  Although I have seen such cases, I wouldn't say they're
naive or wrong.  I submit that "**strong**" is simply a variant form
of emphasis.  ReStructuredText includes both to allow for two levels
of emphasis intensity (if the author chooses to employ both).

> On the other hand, that's going to strengthen the case
> for having a variety of specialist interpreted text roles...

See my follow-up.

> 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>

That's a job for stylesheets.  The markup shouldn't know or care.

-- David Goodger    http://starship.python.net/~goodger

Programmer/sysadmin for hire: http://starship.python.net/~goodger/cv