Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook for individual layout senseless ?

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 06:25:43PM +0100, Holger Prause wrote:
> 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 ?,
 
It seems that Docbook is not a good fit for your data.  
Why not create your own elements, such as <customername>,
<customerdescription>, etc., and then write a
stylesheet to format those elements?  There is no
need to force your data into DocBook elements.

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