RE: [docbook-apps] DocBook 4.5 -> DocBook 5

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi,
 
>  However, if you use xincludes or entities, your transformed DB 5 document structure won't 
> mirror your DB 4 structure. Most stylesheets that I've seen create one large transformed file. 

Right. I forgot to insert a useful link yesterday. Thanks to Jirka and other authors this topic is 
already covered in the Transition Guide:

 "Converting DocBook V4.x documents to DocBook V5.0"
 http://docbook.org/docs/howto/#convert4to5


> Once you know what elements you need to replace, I'd recommend transform your doc manually
> if you want to retain the structure.

It depends on how many files and how big your document is. For small documents this is probably
easier to do it manually. However, I doubt that for big documents this is a useful method. :) I think
a transformation with the stylesheet saves a lot of time. Maybe it does not get you to 100% but
very close. The rest can be done manually.

In case you have a big document, I see two methods:

(1) Preserve your entities as describe in the link above and transform each file one by one.
     I'm not sure if the stylesheet takes care of XInclude elements. Probably you have to adapt
     this.

(2) Create a complete file without any XInclude elements and split it later through an XSLT
    step or dbsplit-tools. I haven't tested it so I don't know if this works with DocBook5.
    It's very likely that you don't get the same structure than the original document.
    But the idea is to save time and do most of what can be done automatically and do only some
    minor issues manually.

Just some ideas. :-)


> [...]


Tom