Hi Tom,
You can generate something like what you need already using the olink
mechanism. If you set the stylesheet parameter 'collect.xref.targets'
to a value of 'yes', then when you process your document for HTML output
you will also generate a target.db file that is used in olinking
(there's a parameter to rename that file). It is an XML file that
contains all potential cross reference targets for that document. In
that file, the <div> elements hold the info for the hierarchical
elements, and <obj> elements contain the info for the nonhierarchical
elements (tables, figures, etc.). For each, its targetptr attribute
contains the element's id, and its href attribute contains the link to
that element in your output.
Your app could open that file, or you could further process it with a
simple stylesheet to refine it.
Check out this chapter in my book on olinking:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Olinking.html
Bob
On 11/15/2022 3:49 PM, Tom Moore wrote:
Hi all
I have a desktop app and I have written documentation for this app in
DocBook. I am producing webhelp and posting these html pages online.
From within my application I would like to be able to open pages from
the online webhelp in a local browser. All of this works nicely so far.
The problem is knowing which page to open for a given topic. To solve
this problem I would like to produce a file that contains the mappings
between all of the id attributes that are declared in my document and
the name of the chunked html output file that contains the id.
Ideally the mapping would be to the chunk plus anchor if the element
containing the id is not the outermost section, chapter, appendix, etc
of the chunk. Then from within my app I can look up the mapping for a
given id, and request the browser to open the desired page.
I expect that this is something that can be done using xslt
technology, but I do not know where to begin. I am at the skill level
where I have made a few small customizations in a project that used
xslt, but I don't really know how to go about opening a file and
writing output, where to find the id value, where to find the chunk
name, etc. In other words a beginner looking at the start of a steep
learning curve.
Can someone point me in the right direction for this task? I notice
that the javahelp output creates a mapping file that is almost right,
except that it does not use the chunk names derived from the <?dbhtml
filename=""?> processing instructions, which I am using in order to
get links that don't shift around as I add chapters and sections. Is
the javahelp tool a good starting point or would it be better to start
from scratch? Is there a book that you would recommend that is good
to learn from?
Thanks,
Tom
