Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: html cosmetics

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 02:42:31PM -0600, G.L. Grobe wrote:
> > > I've finally got the hang of building some documentation, took awhile,
> but
> > > now another question ...
> > >
> > > Anyone have any references of where I may be able to look about how to
> > > properly add background colors, shade in those example text areas, font
> > > sizes, etc.. cosmetic things.
> > >
> > > Any help much appreciated!
> >
> > This is most easily done by associating a CSS stylesheet
> > with the HTML output. You can do that with the
> > 'html.stylesheet' parameter. If you look in the generated
> > HTML output, you'll see each element is in a <div> with its
> > name, which makes writing css stylesheets that style
> > specific elements easy.
> 
> So ... after I've run db2html on my *.sgml files, Am I supposed to edit the
> outputted html to include CSS style sheets? If so, that's alot of work to
> throw away everytime I re-run db2html. I'm sure I'm misunderstanding how to
> do this ... any help appreciated.

No need to edit the output files.  You can create a
separate CSS stylesheet file that contains all the style
information, and then associate that stylesheet with all of
your html files.  If you look at the HTML output from
DocBook, you'll see a lot of <div class="element"> tags,
where "element" is the DocBook element that produced that
<div>.  You write your css stylesheet to associate CSS styles
with those div class tags (see a good css a reference to
learn how to do that).

To connect it with your files, you set the
'html.stylesheet' parameter in either DSSSL or XSL to the
name of your stylesheet file.  You do that in a stylesheet
customization, which is described in
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/dsssl/dssslgeneral.html#custom.
That parameter causes an HTML <LINK> element to be inserted
into each generated HTML file that associates your
css stylesheet with that HTML file.  Then just make sure the
stylesheet file gets copied to each HTML output directory.
It's a nice system because you can control all the
formatting for all of your output from a single css file.


Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
Caldera International, Inc.                 fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@caldera.com