Re: [docbook-apps] Fwd: Thanks!

[Thomas Schraitle <tom_schr@web.de>]

Hi Frank,

On Fri, 5 Sep 2014 08:58:54 +0000
"Wegmann, Frank" <Frank.Wegmann@softwareag.com> wrote:

> [...]
> 
> We use them for producing PDF files in large volumes, deploying
> DocBook as an intermediate format generated from our in-house XML
> dialect. Now we want to step up and replace our HTML offering with
> WebHelp. As far as I understand it and tested it, the WebHelp
> stylesheet works well for a single DocBook file. But here’s the
> catch: our documentation sets often consist of many “modules”
> resulting in as many DocBook files (and as many PDF files), but to
> produce a single WebHelp for all of them it seems the only way is to
> wrap all DocBook files into a single <set>. Is that correct? Because
> I feel this is not really an option, since some sets comprise several
> thousand pages and we might run into serious performance trouble.
> Alternatively I thought about enriching our current HTML production
> by pointing the webhelpindexer to a completely pre-generated HTML
> set. This way also has some considerable drawbacks: we would have to
> make many changes to our stylesheets to make this WebHelp feature fit
> for HTML (and there’s the navigation help as well). On the other
> hand, we forego producing DocBook, but, as said, we do so for getting
> PDF out of the door anyway...

Maybe DocBook's olink feature is an option for you, see here:

  http://sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Olinking.html
  »When writing technical documentation, it is often necessary to cross
  reference to other information. When that other information is in the
  current document, then DocBook provides support with the xref and
  link elements. But if the information is in another document, you
  cannot use those elements [...]
  The olink element is the equivalent for linking outside the current
  document. It has an attribute for specifying a document identifier
  (targetdoc) as well as the id of the target element (targetptr). The
  combination of those two attributes provides a unique identifier to
  locate cross references. These attributes on olink are available
  starting with the DocBook XML DTD version 4.2.«

With olinks you don't need a set necessarily and performance issues
are also not important. I guess Webhelp does support olinks too as it is
derived from the HTML stylesheets. However, I'm not sure, so you better
try it out. 


-- 
Gruß/Regards,
    Thomas Schraitle