DOCBOOK-APPS: filesystem layout and location of imagedata with thedocbook2html script

[Matthew Kennedy <mkennedy@opushealthcare.com>]

Our brave documentation writers trail-blazing a docbook-based system for
our docs have run into an issue with how <imagedata> fileref attributes
are handled by the docbook2html tool (included in rhl7.1 as the package
docbook-utils-0.6.9-3). They have a file system that basically looks
like this:


   /
   +--sales/
        |
        +--sales.xml
        |
        +--userfiles/
             |
             +--userfiles.xml
             |
             +--images/
                  |
                  +--file1.png


sales.xml is a <book> which includes the entity ref userfiles.xml as a
chapter. userfiles.xml includes the external file file1.png via an
<imagedata fileref="images/file1.png"> element enclosed within the
appropriate image/figure container elements.

The docs get built like this:

    cd sales
    docbook2html sales.xml

They end up with the files:

    /sales/book1.html
    /sales/c8.html                (which is userfiles.xml)
    ...

The problem/issue is that c8.html references the file1.png image via the
URL "images/file1.png" when we had expected
"userfiles/images/file1.png".

Obviously they can correct this issue by specifying <imagedata
fileref="userfiles/images/file1.png"> within userfiles.xml, but this
doesn't seem as flexible as a relative reference to an image based on
the actually entity ref that includes it.

Is this the right solution or is it actually possible to have an
imagedata fileref relative to an entity ref, relative to a base entity
ref?


Thanks,

Matt