Re: DOCBOOK: e 2.71828

[Zack Brown <zbrown at tumblerings dot org>]

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 | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | 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