There are three common text faces that are used to highlight text:
italic, bold, and combination of bold and italic. All
three of these font styles are achieved with the
<emphasis> markup tag.
Table 1. <emphasis> markup
| Markup | Result | Description |
|---|---|---|
<emphasis> this text italic
</emphasis>
| this text italic | Italics is the default font style for the
emphasis tag. |
<emphasis role="bold"> this text bold
</emphasis>
| this text bold | Setting the role attribute to
bold evokes a font style of bold[a]. |
<emphasis role="bolditalic"> this
text both </emphasis>
| this text both | Setting the role attribute to
bolditalics evokes a font style of bold and italics[b]. |
[a] This is standard in XSL DocBook rules 1.??? and greater. [b] This is an SQI enhancement to the CSS style for
HTML and the XSL FO styles for printed. The same
styling can be created with double
| ||
Emphasizing or highlighting text is a useful and common operation in word processing. For example, italics is often used to when introducing a new term.
Emphasis is also used to signify special types of content such as a book title, an authors name, or a computer command. This where DocBook and general word processing differ. In DocBook there are many tag to denote types of content. For example, there is a complete set of tags for identifying a book, its author, published date, publisher, etc.
![[Important]](/wiki/docbook/images/important.png) | Important When a content specific tag exists always use it over the emphasis tag. |
Content specific tags add value to a document because they enable the style sheets to control how that element is display for each publishing channel. Also, if you want to change presentation styles a simple modification to the style sheets will control all future presentation of that element across all documents and styles.
Listed Below are classes of content tags that shopuld be used
instead of directly marking the text with an emphasis tag.
Table 2. Specific Content Tags
| Class of text | Reference for Tags |
|---|---|
| Book and article elements including author, title, publisher, etc. | See ??? |
| Code and program listings | See ??? |
| User interface - command line | See ??? |