node 18419 — Typophile archive

I’m working on a book (laid out in DocBook and rendered to pdf with RenderX’s xep). The book addresses a medical condition named DSD. There are many sections containing “DSD”, and it is frequently plural.

What’s the correct way to set the plural of an initialism when it occurs in an all caps context? For instance, “DSDs AND TIMING OF SURGERY”? If this is typographically correct, I’ll have quite a struggle to convince the software to give special treatment to the final “s” in DSDs.

Thanks,

Cheryl

unknown

You could always do a find and replace after you have finished setting the book.

You could use all smallcaps and a lowercase s or all caps and a lowercase s or smallcaps with initial caps and a lowercase s. I would lean toward the first. I’ve had to do similar things and using find and replace with case sensitivity on works like a charm.