RE: [docbook] Re: Tables, braille and other stuff

["David Cramer" <dcramer at motive dot com>]

I'd suggest writing a custom dtd to hold the information (probably a
variant of docbook that allows docbook block level things below a
certain level): 

<mydtd:widget product-version="1.1">
	<para>This thingy does such and such.</para>
</mydtd:widget>

Then write an xsl that converts mydtd xml to docbook to be included in
your documents--sometimes as a table, sometimes a list, sometimes all of
it, sometimes a subset, depending on your needs. The mydtd xml is just a
database for a specific kind of content that you have a lot of and
reuse. Your makefile respins the mydtd to docbook before running the
document through the docbook xsls.

In my case, it's the metadata of a database schema. Tools exist to
describe the database schema in xml (e.g. db/xml vision from
datamirror). It makes what would be hours of tedious, error prone work
in a traditional dtp tool pretty easy and accurate. Writing the text to
describe the tables and fields is still work, but you get to automate
table and field names, data types, nullability, foreign keys/primary
keys, some hyperlinking, and some indexing.

David 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Pawson [mailto:dpawson@nildram.co.uk] 
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2003 1:43 PM
To: Steinar Bang; docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: Yann Dirson
Subject: Re: [docbook] Re: Tables, braille and other stuff

At 20:19 12/05/2003 +0200, Steinar Bang wrote:
>Here's another example for you, of something that has a semantic
>meaning, and is displayed as a table:

Or at least *could* be displayed as a table.


>A feature matrix.
>
>Ie. something that has a set of products on one axis and a set of
>features on the other axis, and yes/no in the elements (or
>"implemented/not implemented" or "in version >=2.0").
>
>I think this is something that's frequently seen in DocBook type
>documents.


The information is:
   This product has these features.

   Display list is another presentation option?

regards DaveP



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