DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook for individual layout senseless ?

[Holger Prause <h.prause@gmx.net>]

Hello,

I want to discuss the advantage and disadvantag of docbook with u because i 
have to descide if i should take FO(without stylesheet) or Docbook(with 
stylesheet) as XML Printing document.

Out company has a list of customers which should be printed as a list(with
all 
information to the customer) for our support(for a fast lookup).

The data to the customers comes from a Java Bean.So far so good.
Now i see 2 solution for generating the list(in pdf).

1. I tranform the data to docbook and then i write a stylesheet for that 
docbook document

2. I directly tranform the data to FO


When i thought about solution 1 ,i discovered a problem.Imagine i have the 
following information(From the JavaBean) about the customer

Name and Decription

I would tranform this to docbook and the resulting docbook document would
look 
like this:

<article>
  <para>Name: Customername</para>
  <para>Description: Customerdescription</para>
</article>


Now (for example)the name should be red and the description green.But how do
i 
know from which is name and which is Desription, i have only <para></para> 
Tags !(the information got lost) I dont want to use any string-functions.

Every docbook has an id attribute.I could use that attribute to identify the

paragraph afterwards but this would mean that every part that should have an

individual layout(sometime just a single word or sentence) must be placed in
a 
own <para></para>Element or in an "indivual" tag(i have to modify the dtd 
then).The other thing is that the stylesheet becomes more and more
complicated 
for every single word that must have an individual color.

So docbook is for individual layout sensless or am i wrong?. I mean companys

like oreilly uses docbook and many documentations were made in docbooc.But 
documentations have mostly the same layout(every paragraphs are black, etc.)
so 
it would be usefull to use docbooc then.

Has anyone of u used docbooc yet(in projects) ?

What your opiniom about that ?,

Thank you in advance,

Holger

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http://www.gmx.net

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• From: Holger Prause <h.prause@gmx.net>
• To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
• Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 18:15:56 +0100 (MET)

-- 
GMX - Die Kommunikationsplattform im Internet.
http://www.gmx.net

---