Add Italics to mainbooktitle

[bfriesen]

Is there a way to allow italics, bold, etc.. to be used in the mainbook title. When I try it says document type is not configured for this formating style.

Thanks

Bryon

[GarethOakes]

Modifying this context to allow italics/bold etc. is possible by modifying the DTD/Schema. In the case of DITA this is called "specialization". However, there are some limits to specialization and this may be one of them. It is uncommon to allow bold/italics in titles.

If you do end up allowing bold/italics in titles you will also want to make sure your output stylesheets are configured for that as well. Eg. extracted titles are sometimes used for running header/footer or in a ToC or possibly Index. In those cases you often want to strip the bold/italics/etc.

[bfriesen]

Thanks Gareth. We are using the mainbooktitle for the cover of our manuals. This is the only place where it show up that I am aware of. We have a model that has Italics in it, and need them to show on the cover. Is there a different approach for us to think about?

Bryon

[GarethOakes]

A different approach? Some people do their covers in a program outside of Arbortext (eg. InDesign) and then marry them up at the PDF stage.

If you want the covers in the XML then you have to make sure your <mainbooktitle> allows italics (in the DTD/schema) and that your (print/web/epub) stylesheets support it. If you wanted the entire <mainbooktitle> in italics, all the time, then you could just update your stylesheets to force italics for that context.