Am 15.08.2020 um 18:03 schrieb Wolfhart Totschnig
wolfhart.totschnig@xxxxxxxxxxx:

But I am still
curious: What would an approach of type (a) look like in my case? It
seems to me that implementing this approach would again face the
original problem: "turning the punctuation into markup" sounds like a
description of the original problem.

I think that turning plain text into markup is usually done with
xsl:analyze-string in XSLT 2 or 3 or with the function analyze-string in
XSLT 3.

You would do that in one step/mode and then push the result to another
step/mode.

I think Gerrit has a paper or two on a more complex requirement and or
more complete approach.