Re: [docbook-apps] Highlighting new contents

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi Stefan,


On Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:24:20 +0200
Stefan Hinz <stefan.hinz@oracle.com> wrote:

> [... highlight changes ...]
> 
> I was thinking of adding a role attribute to the block level elements 
> that contain new stuff, and then processing it so that it comes out
> as red text or in some other distinguishable way:
> 
> <section role="new">, <para role="new">, etc.
> 
> But I was wondering if there's a better way of doing this, for
> example with a <new>...</new> wrapper that I happened to miss in the
> list of available tags on
> http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html. :-)

Don't fiddle with role, there is the revisionflag[1] attribute
exactly for this purpose. :) It can hold several values (added, deleted,
changed, off) which you can use to highlight your changes. How to use
it is described in Bob's chapter "Highlighting changes"[2]. 

It would be certainly more convenient to add the attribute
automatically. Norman wrote the diffmk utility for this task which
expects an old and a new version. It creates a DocBook file which just
contains elements with revisionflag attributes and their respective
values. I tried it, but it didn't work for me. Maybe things have
changed now.

To display your changes in your XHTML, use the changebars.xsl
customization. It detects the revisionflags and creates a <span> tag
and a class attribute. So you can style it with CSS. Details are
described in Bob's book.

Have fun! :-)


------------
[1]
http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ref-elements.html#common.attributes
[2] http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Changebars.html

-- 
Gruß/Regards,
    Thomas Schraitle