RE: [docbook-apps] Alternative to entities?

["Kenneth Johansson" <ke-joh@sectra.se>]

Hi,

We also use XXE and have had the entity problem. We created a ugly solution:

	  if [ ! -z $(ENTITY_FILE) ]; then \
	    echo Performing entity substitution for $${LOCAL_XML_SOURCE}; \
	    sed -e 's/^#.*//' -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' -e 's/\//\\\//g' -e 's/\&/\\\&/g' -e
's/\(.*\)=\(.*\)/s\/\#ENTITY#\1#ENTITY#\/\2\/g/g' $(ENTITY_FILE) > entities.tmp; \
	    sed -f entities.tmp profiled_tmp.xml > prof_ent_tmp.xml; \

This is part of our Makefile for producing PDf's. What we do is adding our own entities to the XML file:
#ENTITY#product_name#ENTITY#, then adding product_name to the entity file: product_name=EasyAccess Web.

This sed script substitutes the entity with the proper name. Unfortunutaly the writers still see #ENTITY#product_name#ENTITY# in the
text, but they still know what it should be substituted with, most of the time.

/Kenneth


--------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth Johansson	Technical Documentation Manager
Sectra Imtec AB
Teknikringen 20		E-mail: ke-joh AT sectra DOT se
SE-583 30 Linköping	Phone:	+46 13 23 52 00
SWEDEN			Web:	http://www.sectra.se

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gurra Green [mailto:gurra_green@hotmail.com]
> Sent: den 17 januari 2005 14:35
> To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Alternative to entities?
>
> Hello all!
>
> We are setting up a DocBook environment for user
> documentation here and need a way of defining constant text
> strings, for example our product name and other "official"
> names which 1) might be changed in the future and 2) we want
> to be sure to have consistent caseing and other formatting as well.
>
> I guess the obvious mechanism would be entities as described
> e.g. by http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ModularEntities.html
> So far, so good. But our choice of editor is XMLMind which
> unfortunately expands all %entity references when reading a
> document with the contents of the entity, thus making the
> whole idea useless after writing the xml file back to disk.
>
> Does anybody have any suggestions on alternate methods for
> accomplishing the same thing? It feels wrong to misuse
> DocBook because of an incomplete tool, but the XMLMind editor
> has a number of verynice features why I am reluctant to
> switching the whole company to another editor. I have googled
> for others with the same problem, but not found anything.
> Grateful for any suggestions, including makefile/perl hacks
> if no "native" DocBook mechanism could be used.
>
>   /Gurra
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today!
> http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger
>
>