Re: [docbook-apps] support for xpointer

[Richard Hamilton <hamilton@xmlpress.net>]

Hi Stefan,

I didn't say it was elegant:-).

I agree that DocBook transclusion may be the way to go. I need to look into it further for our book process.

And a multi-stage process works well for us. Maybe it's my long experience with Unix, but I use multi-stage processes all the time. They let you use the right tool for each step in the process and give you intermediate files that you can examine when things go wrong.

Our current process uses xmllint, xsltproc, saxon (6 and 8), and perl, all stitched together using make (someday I may use ant, but not today:-).

Dick
-------
XML Press
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hamilton@xmlpress.net



On Sep 14, 2014, at 13:01, Stefan Seefeld <stefan@seefeld.name> wrote:

> On 09/14/2014 02:02 PM, Richard Hamilton wrote:
>> Regarding the question of pulling the second listitem from a section with a particular id, I think the following will do the trick (I don't claim it's the most elegant way to do this, but it works with xmllint):
>> 
>>  <xi:include href="filename.xml"
>>              xpointer="xmlns(d=http://docbook.org/ns/docbook)xpointer(//d:section[@xml:id='sect-a']//d:listitem[2]))"/>
> 
> Thanks, that works indeed !
> But the syntax is rather verbose and cumbersome, especially given that I
> want to establish references such as the above for a couple of hundreds
> of definitions in a single (modular) document.
> I'm considering defining my own technique (drawing inspiration from
> http://www.docbook.org/docs/transclusion/transclusion.html), then using
> a two-phase processing with the first doing the transclusion processing
> to generate valid DocBook, then the second to do the actual formatting.
> 
> Thanks for all the help (and the continued work that goes into DocBook's
> evolution),
> 
>        Stefan
> 
> -- 
> 
>      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...
>