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Re: Docbook for individual layout senseless ?
- From: Bob Stayton <bobs at caldera dot com>
- To: Holger Prause <h dot prause at gmx dot net>, docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org
- Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 11:59:47 -0800
- Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook for individual layout senseless ?
- References: <23103.1013102743@www31.gmx.net>
On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 06:25:43PM +0100, Holger Prause wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to discuss the advantage and disadvantag of docbook with u because i
> have to descide if i should take FO(without stylesheet) or Docbook(with
> stylesheet) as XML Printing document.
>
> Out company has a list of customers which should be printed as a list(with
> all
> information to the customer) for our support(for a fast lookup).
>
> The data to the customers comes from a Java Bean.So far so good.
> Now i see 2 solution for generating the list(in pdf).
>
> 1. I tranform the data to docbook and then i write a stylesheet for that
> docbook document
>
> 2. I directly tranform the data to FO
>
>
> When i thought about solution 1 ,i discovered a problem.Imagine i have the
> following information(From the JavaBean) about the customer
>
> Name and Decription
>
> I would tranform this to docbook and the resulting docbook document would
> look
> like this:
>
> <article>
> <para>Name: Customername</para>
> <para>Description: Customerdescription</para>
> </article>
>
>
> Now (for example)the name should be red and the description green.But how do
> i
> know from which is name and which is Desription, i have only <para></para>
> Tags !(the information got lost) I dont want to use any string-functions.
>
> Every docbook has an id attribute.I could use that attribute to identify the
>
> paragraph afterwards but this would mean that every part that should have an
>
> individual layout(sometime just a single word or sentence) must be placed in
> a
> own <para></para>Element or in an "indivual" tag(i have to modify the dtd
> then).The other thing is that the stylesheet becomes more and more
> complicated
> for every single word that must have an individual color.
>
> So docbook is for individual layout sensless or am i wrong?. I mean companys
>
> like oreilly uses docbook and many documentations were made in docbooc.But
> documentations have mostly the same layout(every paragraphs are black, etc.)
> so
> it would be usefull to use docbooc then.
>
> Has anyone of u used docbooc yet(in projects) ?
>
> What your opiniom about that ?,
It seems that Docbook is not a good fit for your data.
Why not create your own elements, such as <customername>,
<customerdescription>, etc., and then write a
stylesheet to format those elements? There is no
need to force your data into DocBook elements.
Bob Stayton 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Technical Publications voice: (831) 427-7796
Caldera International, Inc. fax: (831) 429-1887
email: bobs@caldera.com