[tei-council] pdf version of guidelines, fonts

[Conal Tuohy]

On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 11:09 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> Conal Tuohy wrote:
> > I'm not sure if this is barking up the wrong tree (because the solution seems rather too obvious to me), but shouldn't these values be encoded as e.g. <num value="9.12E-31"/> which I believe can appear within <note>. This could be rendered by replacing the "E" with "×10" and superscripting the rest with the awesome power of TeX. ;-)
> >   
> good god, you want me to interpret @value and re-express it in a different
> presentation notation??

Exactly. :-)

Seriously, you did ask Syd for any notation - even MathML! - from which
you could construct superscripts. So in all seriousness, what is wrong
with using e.g. 
<num value="1E-323"/>? Isn't the data.numeric datatype precisely the
mechanism which we've provided for the purpose of "scientific
notation"? 

I think it's preferable to a purely presentational encoding like 10<hi
rend="sup">-323</hi>. The real point of the <desc> is after all to
express the mathematical meaning of the value, and <num value="1E-323"/>
does this in a way which 10<hi @rend='sup'>-323</hi> doesn't. 

More verbosely, it could be encoded as a num containing presentational
markup as well:

<num value="1E-323">10<hi rend="sup">-323</hi></num> 

... but IMHO <num value="1E-323"/> should be enough.

IMHO the rendering strategy for any particular output format should be
provided by the rendering engine responsible. Superscript might not be
appropriate for certain output formats, such as braille or speech, so a
semantic markup should ideally be included (i.e. using num/@value).

Considering it from another angle, how SHOULD one render <num
value="1E-323"/>? In HTML I would give it as <span
class="num">10<sup>-323</sup></span>.

Finally, from a purely pragmatic point of view, I think there's a
problem with using the superscript numeral characters, which is that
very many fonts don't contain good (or any) glyphs for the numerals
other than 1, 2, and 3. The upshot is that the other digits may not be
rendered in certain web browsers, or may be rendered in a substitute
font. e.g. here are the superscripted digits 0 to 9: ⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹

Con
-- 
Conal Tuohy
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre
www.nzetc.org