[xmlroff] How important is small caps?

[Tony Graham]

On Sat, Feb 09 2008 18:46:16 +0000, debacle at debian.org wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 04:49:57PM +0000, Tony Graham wrote:
>> How important is it at this point that xmlroff supports small caps?

Thanks for the two responses.

> For me it's just a "nice to have". Other things are more
> critical, e.g. break-before="page" and keep-together="always".

And hopefully headers and footers, since that's what I'm working on now.

The options for what I/we should do about small caps include:

 - Do nothing and let Pango implement it eventually

 - Make urgent-sounding comments on the Pango bug report so Pango gets
   to in sooner rather than later

 - Raise a fontconfig bug since it appears fontconfig doesn't report
   the presence of small caps glyphs in a font

 - Fake small caps in xmlroff

 - Make a patch for Pango to fake small caps

Since small caps appears to be only "nice to have" for everybody, I
propose to do the first option and not do anything at present.

> (If someone happens to like stories by Terry Pratchett: The
> character Death speaks in small caps, so it's important!)

Once an enthusiast marks up a Terry Pratchett book using DocBook, then
handling Death would fit in with the goals for xmlroff.

Regards,


Tony.