On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 10:33:00AM -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> I have a need to include the mathematical constant e, 2.71828..., the
> base of the natural logarithms, in a book I'm writing. According to
> the Unicode folks, they have no special character for this and none
> is needed. I should just use the normal ASCII e. That's simple enough.
>
> In typesetting a mathematical constant of this nature is normally
> italicized so it's not just plain text. How should I represent this
> in DocBook?
>
> <inlineequation>e</inlineequation> is not valid because the
> inlineequation element can't contain PCDATA.
>
> The best I can figure is
>
> <inlineequation>
> <inlinemediaobject>
> <textobject>
> <phrase>e</phrase>
> </textobject>
> </inlinemediaobject>
> </inlineequation>
>
> which really seems excessively complicated.
Couldn't you just define an entity that would include all that markup for
you without all the noise?
> Going to MathML seems
> even worse. Is this really the best I can do?
> --
>
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | Elliotte Rusty Harold | | Writer/Programmer |
> +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
> | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
> | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
> | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
> | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
> | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
--
Zack Brown
