Re: [docbook] Automatic numbering in DocBook

["John L. Clark" <jlc6@po.cwru.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 12:45:17PM +1000, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> I have a scenario which crops up again and again. I work for the
> government, and as such we're quite policy happy and would love to use
> DocBook for this. I had a project about 6 months ago that stalled
> because I couldn't work out how to do numbered paragraphs ;
> 
> Heading
> 
>  1. some paragraph.
>  2. some other paragraph.
> 
> New heading
> 
>  Sub-heading
> 
>     3. more paragraph.
>     4. and yet more.
> 
>   etc.

I also work for the government, and I understand that those policy wonks
like universally numbered paragraphs.  As with some of the other
discussion on this topic, I think this is a stylesheet issue.  Where do
your users need to see these numbers?  For example, my users want to see
the numbers in the editing environment (XXE) and when documents are
converted to whatever format for publishing.  In XXE I had to write a
stylesheet extension to do this because XXE doesn't support CSS-style
counters; those environments that do support CSS counters make it easy.
If you're using XSLT for conversions, then there is the <xsl:number/>
instruction, which was made for this kind of use.  But the point is that
this can be accomplished external to the doc; the number of the
paragraph (or any element) in the document is basically implicit.

However, if the request is for DocBook XSL support for this feature,
well then, that makes sense, but that goes to that other list.  ;-)

Take care,

    John L. Clark

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