DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: glossary redux

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

[Followups directed to docbook-apps]

/ Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@jabber.org> was heard to say:
| I noticed the discussion yesterday about glossaries, and I seem to have a
| related question. I'd like to convert an existing dictionary I've written
| from HTML to DocBook (either SGML or XML). Based on Norman Walsh's reply
| at http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook-tools-discuss/2000/msg00280.html,
| it seems that I should be able to hack the DSSSL stylesheets so that I can
| have one glossary source file (e.g., SGML) output a separate HTML for each
| <glossdiv/> using jade (just as I can do when <article/> is the root-level
| element). However, when I add the appropriate lines to dbchunk.dsl based
| on the URL noted above, I don't get chunked output when I type 'db2html
| myglossaryfile.sgml' (or when I use jade directly). Would it be better for
| me to use DocBook XML + XSLT for this as opposed to SGML?

Yes, probably. Not for any deep technical reason beyond the fact that
the chunking logic in the DSSSL stylesheets is deeply hairy and there
are no convenient hooks to change how it works.

It's fairly hairy in the XSL stylesheets, but it's a little more
obvious (no, there's probably nothing obvious about it, but relatively
speaking :-) in the XSLT stylesheets.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Limited in his nature, infinite in
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | his desires, man is a fallen god
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | who remembers heaven.--Lamartine