I know that you have already had a good deal of response to
this, but you asked about potential solutions and there is one I haven’t
seen mentioned.
We sometimes have requirements for short documents and have set
up the transforms to use an article as the root element for this type of
document. If you need a title page more closely resembling a book than an
article (which has a much simpler title page by default) and want to preserve both
the traditional article title page and a book-style title page for articles,
you can use a role attribute on the articles that you want processed like a
book to indicate that. As an alternative, you can have the
transform check to see if the article is the root element and decide what type
of title page to use based on that characteristic. Articles allow you to
use the section elements directly as children of the root element instead of
having to include the chapter element in the hierarchy. This would meet
your requirement without needing to change the DocBook schema and can be done
now rather than having to wait for DocBook to change.
Regards,
Larry Rowland
From: Kate.Wringe@sybase.com
[mailto:Kate.Wringe@sybase.com]
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 1:26 PM
To: DocBook Technical Committee; docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [docbook] Sections and topics
Hello,
Here's the
problem that I am increasingly running into: We have a <section> in one
book that we want to reuse as a <chapter> in another book and vice versa.
For example, in
book A, there is section about using a tool with product A and in book B, we
need to include the same information, but it must exist at the chapter level.
Currently, in
order to solve this problem, in Book A we create a <section> that
contains the information and we xinclude this <section> into an
essentially empty <chapter> element in Book B. As a result, our TOC
becomes bloated and we end up with these funny chapter pages (in HTML Help)
that only contain vague sentences followed by links to sections.
It would be
easier for us if the book structure allowed the <section> element to
exist at the same level as the <chapter> element.
So that, for
example, the following would be valid:
<book><title>titletext</title>
<section>text....
</section>
</book>
I understand
that the section element is supposed to contain information that is a section
of something else and so the committee has been reluctant to see the
<section> as a direct element of the <book> element. I had hoped
that the <topic> element in modular DocBook would offer a better
alternative. Unfortunately, from what I understand, you
cannot have a
topic embedded within a topic. So, even if we switched to using topics, we'd
have the same problem as described above.
Apologies if I
am bringing up a subject that has already been addressed. Any suggestions as to
how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Kate
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Kate
Wringe |
Tech Writer 2| Sybase
445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 |
kate.wringe@sybase.com | www.sybase.com
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