Re: [docbook-apps] Formatting problems with appendix in article

[Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 10:25:45AM +0100, Morus Walter wrote:
> Subject: page break before article appendix?
> Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 15:16:37 +0200
> Hi,
> 
> I have some problems with the usage of an appendix in an article and
> it's rendering using the xslt stylesheets.
> 
> First:
> I can get a page break before each toplevel section in an article by
> using
> <xsl:attribute-set name="section.title.level1.properties">
>   <xsl:attribute name="break-before">page</xsl:attribute>
> </xsl:attribute-set>
> 
> I didn't find a posibility to achive this for appendices though.
> (Except copying the article/appendix-template to my customisation and 
> changing the level in the section.heading template call from 2 to 1.)

I think that is your only option right now.

> The structure of my article is
> section, section, ..., section, appendix, appendix
> so I don't see, why appendix should not appear on a new page, if a top
> level section does.
> 
> So why is appendix treated as a second level structure here?

Good question.
 
> Second:
> When I use sections and subsections inside an appendix, the table of
> contents contains an additional level of entries for the appendix.
> E.g.
> 1. bla
> 1.1 blub
> A  Appendix
>    1 foo 
>    1.1 bar
> 
> I worked around this using simplesect instead of section for subsections
> within the appendix, but I think the additional level should be taken
> into account.
> 
> Are these bugs or do I miss something?

Some of this is a result of the confused identity of an
appendix in a article.  In a book, an appendix is a sibling
to chapters, and an appendix can contain sect1, sect2, etc.
But an article has no chapters, so an appendix is a sibling
to top level sections, yet it still can contain sect1,
sect2, etc.

That said, I don't know why an article appendix is
treated as a second-level section by the stylesheets.
I think it may be a styling issue, since one could consider
an article appendix to be of less importance than the
content of the article in its sections, so it should 
be formatted with a smaller heading.

It seems to me it should be treated as a top-level section.
Although if you use sect1, sect2, etc.  inside an article
appendix, you would effectively have to format a sect1 as
a sect2, etc.  

You might file an RFE on the DocBook sourceforge site
to address both issues.
-- 

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