Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Breaking a document into smaller pieces

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 02:16:51PM +0100, Joachim Ziegler wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a document that is getting larger and larger.
> 
> Can someone please tell what's the state of the art concerning breaking 
> a document into smaller physical chunks?
> 
> a) using entities as described in "The Definite Guide":
> 
> <!ENTITY chap1 SYSTEM "chap1.sgm">
> <!ENTITY chap2 SYSTEM "chap2.sgm">
> ]>
> <book><title>My First Book</title>
> &chap1;
> &chap2;
> </book>
> 
> b) using XIncludes?
> 
> 
> I don't need a fancy mechanism for cross referencing between my 
> documents. I'm writing one, large document.
> 
> I'm using Emacs with psgml. Using method a) does not allow me to 
> associate any DTD to my chunk, so psgml is worthless, right?
> 
> But Xincludes seem to much more very complicated to me, especially 
> concerning the referencing mechasnism. Do I *have to* use olinks?

You need to use olinks in a modular document only if you
want to be able to validate each module.  If you don't use
olink, then when you try to validate a module by itself,
any xref or link pointing to another module will be reported
as missing the ID.

But if you only care about validating the whole document,
then you don't need to use olinks.  In that case, either
XInclude or entities work about the same.  

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
The SCO Group                               fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@sco.com