RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Breaking a document into smaller pieces

[Jeff Beal <jeff dot beal at ansys dot com>]

The stylesheets will generate a ??? for broken xref's.  Any validator (e.g.
xmllint) will complain about the links, but that won't prevent you from
getting output through an XSLT processor.

As for olinks, I don't see any reason for you to use them for a single book.
We publish a set of 26 books totalling about 10,000 printed pages as a
single XML document (i.e. without using <olink/>).  That takes a lot of time
(4+ hours on a dual-processor P3), but that works for us.

If you want to get a quick look at "just what you've written", use the
rootid XSL parameter.  If you set rootid equal to an ID in your document
(which could be at the chapter, section, or even para level), only that
element will be output, but it will be published exactly as if it were built
as part of the larger document.

Jeff Beal

-----Original Message-----
From: Joachim Ziegler [mailto:ziegler@mpi-sb.mpg.de]
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 5:04 AM
To: Bob Stayton
Cc: Joachim Ziegler; docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Breaking a document into smaller pieces


Bob Stayton wrote:
> You need to use olinks in a modular document only if you
> want to be able to validate each module.  If you don't use
> olink, then when you try to validate a module by itself,
> any xref or link pointing to another module will be reported
> as missing the ID.
> 
> But if you only care about validating the whole document,
> then you don't need to use olinks.  In that case, either
> XInclude or entities work about the same.  
> 

Since this is the first big document I'm writing with DocBook, what 
advide would you give me: To forget xrefs altogether and use olinks from 
the beginning?

The document will become large (a book) and eventually there will be a 
point where it will take too long to transform the whole document into 
HTML just to have a quick look at what I've just written.

Isn't there a way, like in Latex, to ignore for a certain moment the 
broken links and to just output some "???" ?

Greetings,
Joachim