I've been following this discussion with great interest. I'm involved in the Braille-in-DAISY project which is looking to enhance DtBook (which is to some extent a variant of DocBook) with the additional tags necessary to make possible the first fully automatic transcription to braille.
I'd like to respond to the question: >Does an author of the book need to bother with semantic tagging on a >scale that DocBook _requires_? Is it a task for a publisher if they >want it? First, the issue of who should do the tagging is probably for an organization to decide on the basis of cost-effectiveness and not something we need to dwell on here. Also, one can certainly imagine inventing tools to make it easy to add at least some tagging in a final editing step. Anyway, my point is that semantic tagging of a single source, however done, is not only going to allow one to produce better HTML and PDF from the same XML file but is going to have other significant advantages which are not all necessarily immediately obvious. As far as my own interests, I already anticipate a huge decrease in the cost of converting documents to accessible formats such as large print and braille. Here's just one small example where DocBook scale semantic tagging makes a difference to English braille in a way that might be unexpected to someone unfamiliar with braille rules. Braille is to some extent a shorthand and uses each of the letters to represent a word when the letter stands alone. For example, the letter _p_ translates the word _people_ and the letter _x_ translates (arbitrarily) the word _it_. Braille translations thus have to insert a special braille escape character when a letter stands for itself rather than for the default word in order to avoid nonsense. (Using the braille equivalent of italics or quotes would be ambiguous.) In this case tagging the literal or symbolic use of letters with the equivalent of HTML <var> would avoid the need for heuristics in the braille transcribing software. Sincerely, Susan Jolly _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
