Alternatives to entities for referencing small substitutions

[Paul Hoadley <paulh@logicsquad.net>]

Hello,

I’ve been out of the DocBook ecosystem for a few years, but I’ve got some documentation to write and I’m rolling up my sleeves! I would have thought the following would be a FAQ, but Dave Pawson’s page is giving me a 404 right now.

What is the state of the art for small text substitutions (basically just domain-specific terms) that can also be varied via the profiling machinery? I have an application that can run as more than one “product”, and each product shows domain-specific variations in labels, for example, in the user interface. There might be a generic term for some object “Foo”, but Application A will call this a “Bar”, and Application B calls it a “Baz”. What I want to be able to do is refer to a “Foo” throughout the source, but substitute “Bar” for App A’s output, and “Baz” for App B’s. What’s the best way to achieve this?

-- 
Paul Hoadley
http://logicsquad.net/