Re: [docbook-apps] Chunking at the chapter level

[Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com>]

> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 08:16:46AM -0400, Julie Wetherill wrote:
> 
> I'm a newbie to DocBook so apologies if this is a naive
> question. Using publishing tools in Windows, I've generated
> my first chunked document. I would prefer to chunk only
> at the chapter level, but I believe this is not a standard
> chunking option. I've reviewed many DocBook tutorials and
> archives of this list looking for hints at workarounds. All
> I've found are a few discussions of this in the April
> 2001 archive of docbook-apps, but I'm not clear on how
> to proceed.
> 
> These were Norm's instructions
> from a 24 April 2001 message:
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook-apps/2001-q2/msg00241.html
> "If you grab the XSL stylesheets from CVS, you'll find
> that I've added two parameters to control chunking:
> chunk.sections and chunk.first.sections. If you turn off
> chunk.sections, you'll get chapter-only level chunking. If
> you turn on chunk.first.sections, you'll get a separate
> chunk for each top-level section, including the first. "
> 
> I'm new to XSLT and its configuration. Is this now the
> recommended method to achieve chapter chunking?

No, the chunk.sections parameter was replaced with
chunk.section.depth about 8 months later.

See this reference for more help on chunking
with XSL:

http://www.sagehill.net/xml/docbookxsl/HtmlOutput.html#Chunking

> If yes,
> how do I make it so? I'm running on docbook-xsl-1.60.1
> which should be much more recent than April 2001. But
> I'm not finding the "chunk.sections" parameter in any of
> the chunk style sheets. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong
> place? Also don't know what it means to, as Norm says,
> "...turn off chunk.sections" -- is this a string parameter
> added to the xsltproc command line statement? I tried
> "string param chunk.sections 0" but xsltproc doesn't
> recognize the chunk.sections entity.

The proper syntax for the command line option is:

--stringparam chunk.section.depth 0

> Another obviously naive question: if I grab updated style
> sheets from the CVS, what is the procedure for installing
> these updates locally? I sense it is not as simple as
> copying the files to the appropriate directory. Based on
> Norm's April message, I did go to Sourceforge and pick up
> individual chunk* stylesheets (assuming these contained
> the new chunk.sections) but don't know what to do with
> them. Or maybe someone can point me to instructions on
> how to upgrade a local docbook publishing installation
> with updated components pulled from the CVS?

You could create a stylesheet customization file and
use xsl:include to include the updated files.  See this
reference for creating a customization file:

http://www.sagehill.net/xml/docbookxsl/CustomMethods.html#CustomDriverFile

But I don't recommend a beginner update their stylesheet
installation from CVS unless it is really necessary.
At any given time the CVS files may have been edited and
may not work with your other installed files.  With one
of the distributions (like 1.60.1), at least all the files
have been tested together.


Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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