JATS standard non-alignment case: italic toggle

[castedo]

The italic toggle feature (<italic toggle="yes">) of the NISO JATS standard appears to not reflect actual usage in:

• PMC JATS XML archived in the PMC Open Access Subset
• HTML rendering by PubMed Central, and
• PDF production of least two publishers.

The details of the NISO standard are at:

https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/archiving/tag-library/1.4/element/italic.html

https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/archiving/tag-library/1.4/attribute/toggle.html

The NISO standard 1.4 states the intended behavior of toggle="yes" and makes clear the default XML attribute value is "yes".

In my JATS XML sample of ~100K JATS XML files archived ~2025H1, approx half of <italic> elements have an explicit toggle="yes" value set.

However, HTML/CSS generated by PubMed Central does not appear to do anything with this tag attribute toggle (set to yes or absent). Furthermore, the publisher's PDF does not follow the NISO standard. So both PubMed Central HTML generation and the publisher's PDF production are in sync (ignore it completely). The NISO standard does not document that PubMed Central and some publishers ignore this value.

Two example are:

• the subscript "TEM" in the 4th row of table 1 of PMC11694450
• the superscript "g" after "NS" in the 9th row of table 9 of PMC11582481