Quote:
Originally Posted by SomeSteve
Some books contain big chunks of text in italics that are not meant to be stressed. For instance, a novel might commence with a kind of prelude, all italicized, that could go on for several pages. Or a character's thoughts might be italicized, sometimes for a paragraph or more at a time. (I'm not advocating that anybody go wild with italics this way. I find such things a chore to read, and a temptation to skip.)
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Actually I mentioned that un-emphasised italics are more common. Also poetry, song and telepathy or mind-speech.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SomeSteve
Occasionally, in such expanses of italicized text, a word will emerge that is not in italics, to indicate that it should be stressed. How should this be coded so that a machine reader will emphasize it without changing the appearance of the text? If you enclose the word to be stressed in <em> tags, it will be italicized and appear indistinguishable from the text that surrounds it. If you enclose it in <strong> tags, it will be displayed in bold, instead of in a normal typeface (and I don't know if a machine reader would emphasize it, anyway). Can it be done?
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Yes, you have a CSS class for <em> used in a block of italics. The CSS can visually use normal (my preferred) or bold (some prefer).
<em class="in-italic-block">not</em>
The CSS will over-ride default behaviour of the visual rendering engine, but is usually ignored by a TTS system. I've not tested it, but that's what I'd do. I think that can even be done by a Character Style in LO Writer, so that no editing of the epub made by Calibre from an extra Save As in docx is needed.