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Re: DOCBOOK:





Thank for pointing out OLink. After some reading, testing and snooping
around, I think I'll probably stay with my large PDF file because using
olink in my case seems to add a large maintenance overhead.

My set of books:

  set -
     |--Overview-Book
     |--Book1
     |--Book2
     ...

is currently one big XML file. In fact only Overview-Book holds a DT
declaration, the others are included via an <!ENTITY Book1 ...>. Each book
might include more external xml files (e.g. generated via pod2docbook).
>From this I can produce the PDF file and a HTML version (using DSSSL/jade).

The tricky bit comes in, when I want to have each book separately *and*
want to freely crossreference. For the separate books I have for each of
them a 'shell' xml file containing the DT and entity declarations. Thus I
can have a PDF just for that book but I can't reference a chapter in Book2
from whithin Book1 (I could do that in the big set document but then I
could no longer use the same xml content files in the separate books).

Here comes the OLink. To use it, as far as I can see, I have to switch from
xml to sgml as the xml DTD does not allow subdocuments (no big difference,
I am using Emacs/psgml). But the crucial thing is, that I have to use 'late
binding' for the OLinks because they are used in both cases, when the HTML
version of everything is generated and in the case only one of the books is
rendered in PDF. For the HTML version I don't know in advance the filenames
generated (a section might end up in x1911.html). Thus the necessity to
maintain a cgi-bin script to resolve the links in the HTML case.

Hmmm... may be a solution would be to have 'source' xml files with a new
'MyLink' type which gets transformed via a small XSL into xrefs for
subsequently producing the HTML and into OLinks for PDF. Or, is it possible
to customize the OLink in the HTML case as here the link end is known ?!

Sorry, got a bit long this time. Any thoughts ?

Thanks,
Ekkehard







Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> on 04/06/2001 03:51:48 PM

To:   docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
cc:
Subject:  Re: DOCBOOK:


/ ekkehard.goerlach@pharma.Novartis.com was heard to say:
| Right now the PDF rendition is one big document. Is it possible to
produce
| a separate PDF file for each book without loosing the possibility to
| crossreference between them (e.g. see Chapter 2 in "The other Book") ?

Yes. See http://nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl/doc/olinksemantics.html

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Abandoning rhyme and fixed rules
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | in favor of other intuitive rules
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | brings us back to fixed rules and
                                   | to rhyme with renewed
                                   | respect.--Jean Cocteau

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