[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AlanHK

OK. So e.g. I italicise New York Times but don't emphasise it vocally.

However, I've never seen a commercial book that made that distinction.

This was partially discussed in those 2 previous large threads on the topic.

Yes, most people just go for the easy/quick: all <i> or all <em>... (or you have no-good tools/workflows which force markup fully one way or the other.)

Although much rarer, there are programs/tools/people that generate more semantically correct HTML.

Like Citation Management Systems (Zotero, Mendeley) generate proper <i> + <em> + <b>.

There's also lots of other alternate workflows, like: DOCBook->HTML, LaTeX->HTML, or JATS (an XML format used in journal articles).

Publishers/authors will mark italics/emphasis/bold in their books properly, so they could more easily swap citation styles, mathematical styles, etc.:

• A journal article in a journal may follow a different citation style than republishing it as a chapter in a book.
  
  • Some citation styles use "Vol. 1, No. 2", others may use "<b>1</b>(2)".
• In physics, a vector may be written as a <b>i</b> letter. Other styles may use a "hat" (î).

Originally Posted by AlanHK

And none of my clients has ever mentioned this distinction to me. Certainly none of the authors have.

Doubt they have a clue. But you, as the ebook creator, should be the knowledgable one.

They probably won't know one thing about <blockquote>, <h1>, <table> + <thead>, alt tags, or EPUB3 footnote markup either... but you'd want to mark all this stuff to the best of your ability (and teach them about it) to help future readers/conversions/tools.

* * *

Properly marked headings for example.

I've discussed how HTML from my ebooks gets converted/reposted as articles on a website.

After publishing ~100 ebooks, the web admin decided to add a Javascript TOC. Now, because I had all my headings marked properly, poof, a reader on the site can jump through the web-version similar to an EPUB's TOC + the Javascript TOC highlights where you're located in the book.

(Blind/visually-impaired readers using JAWS/NVDA would've already been able to navigate using headings! And now sighted readers can now too! )

Because I followed standards + laid the groundwork... the tools/enhancements will come.

Originally Posted by AlanHK

Anyway, I make books to read and look good on paper or screen.

if someone wants to run it through a TTS engine, good luck to them. They can pay me if they want me to prep the text for that.

If you mark the:

• Headings
  
  • using <h1>-><h6>, NOT <p class="heading">.
• Paragraphs
  
  • using <p>, NOT <div class="p">.
• Italics
  
  • using <i> or <em>, NOT <span class="italics">.
• Tables
  
  • using <table>, NOT <img>.
• Proper lang + xml:lang
  
  • Mark the Chinese as Chinese!

then you'll be most of the way there.