Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook Structuring Problems

["Juan R. Migoya" <jmigoya at ingeteam dot es>]

I may be wrong, but for what I've seen you need something more than SGML
to carry out your task.
The example I sen't in my previous post was created by a Perl program. In
fact, what I do is to write a text file (something like a catalog) with the
"parts" (in this case "functions") I want in my final document. Then, the Perl
program generate that file and I run Jade over it.
I am in a similar situation than John: There are several people developing software
and hardware and I must document those developings. I must keep several databases
in a server to keep track of new H/S products or new releases. I think that I
can't make it just with SGML, so I use the databases and small Perl programs
to acomplish those task. To be honest, I'm in the beginning but with good prospects
(too optimist?).
If somebody have more experience about this item, I (we) would appreciate any tip.

Thanks and regards,

John Storrs wrote:
> 
> I guess I wasn't clear enough so I'll try again. I want to make distributed
> declarations of the source files for a Docbook Set containing many Books. The
> standard method which Juan describes - entity declarations in the top level
> 'internal subset' - isn't distributed. It requires all source files in the Set
> to be identified in the top level file. In the applications I'm thinking of
> this could be 1000s of files. In a large software project, composition would be
> defined using nested #includes, distributed makefiles and the like. It would
> be unmanageable if all the source files which make up, say, the Linux kernel,
> had to be explicitly listed in a top level file. If I have a Set of 100 Books,
> I would want the definitions of each Book, or even lower level elements, to be
> self-sufficient and complete. Then I could process individual Books, or
> different groupings of them, without having to prepare different sets of file
> declarations each time. Another problem is content re-use, where different
> Books in a Set share some source files. Because IDs have to be unique within a
> document, and because sgml doesn't provide variables at document level which
> might be used to modify IDs of shared files, sharing doesn't work at all well.
> These two issues seem to me to point to the need for something like the C
> preprocessor, with #includes, #defines, conditionals etc. But perhaps there is
> a solution inside the sgml system. Any guidance?
> 
> John

-- 

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Juan R. Migoya
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