textobject/textdata for external program code

[Rob.Exley@equifax.com]

I am currently writing a technical spec using DocBook XML 4.2 and
publishing using Cocoon 2.0.4 with Saxon 6.5.2 and docbook-xsl-1.61.2.

I have been experiencing problems including external DTD files (and xml
documents) within an appendix of the document and have finally succeeded by
using a textdata element within a textobject nested in a programlisting
element. However I seem to have encountered two problems specifically with
this:

I have been forced to use the fileref attribute of the textdata object and
hard-code the path to the external document. I would ideally have liked to
us an entityref and then define all my external entities at the top of the
document. This however seem to give me blank output for both html and pdf
output. The following was my original document snippet

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd" [
<!ENTITY generic-request.dtd SYSTEM
"/home/r_exley/tmp/code/xml/generic-request.dtd">
]>
.
.
.
<section>
  <title>generic-request.dtd</title>
  <programlisting>
    <textobject>
      <textdata entityref="generic-request.dtd" />
    </textobject>
  </programlisting>
</section>
.
.
.

I have since replaced the textdata element in the above with

      <textdata fileref="/home/r_exley/tmp/code/xml/generic-request.dtd" />

and this gives me the expected output. My assumption for using the
entityref approach was that I could extend this to make advantage of
catalogs.

Also in the pdf output resulting from this, the first line for each
included text file is indented, this is somewhat strange and throws the
formatting out (and looks ugly). This only occurs in the pdf output, the
html output is fine.

Within my Cocoon pipeline I am calling my customization stylesheet which is
pulling in the appropriate fo/html docbook stylesheet from the docbook-xsl
distribution.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I am using this as an exercise to prove
DocBook is the way forward within my group for technical documentation,
therefore I would like to get this right.


---
Rob Exley
Senior Technical Consultant
Equifax Plc

e-mail: rob.exley@equifax.com
tel: 01274 759610



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