Character styles in docbook 5

Question

What are the character styles in docbook 5? I know there are paragraph styles which are sect1-title, sect2-title, etc. I want to know what character styles are there. Thank you.

Answer 1

By using stylesheets, you can define as many "character styles" as you like. The set of stylesheets that most people use (available from the DocBook SourceForge project) provide default styling for many inline elements. There is no exhaustive list detailing any "standard" styles, but it is fairly easy to customize the output to your liking.

A style such as "italics + underline" is not supported by default, but you can add it if you want. By convention, the role attribute is used to provide a classification ("stylesheet hint") for an element. See http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/CustomInlines.html for more details.

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It is worth emphasizing that DocBook markup (the elements and attributes defined in a schema) is not concerned with "styles". DocBook is a semantic markup language and a key concept is that you define/describe what something is rather than what it should look like.