Hi David et al.
Thanks for all of the advice!
The reason why I wanted to use a wrapper like a div or a refentry tag was
to try and preserve the amount of drilling that the
user would have to do in the output (in this case HTMLhelp and PDF).
Originally the output looked like this:
LargeChapter title
first sect1 title
second sect1tile
third sect1 tile
....
two-hundredth sect 1 title
The easiest solution, and the one that I think we're going to go with is
to just demote our sect1s to sect2s.
New output would look like this:
LargeChapter title
intro sect1 title (e.g., statements a to f)
first sect2 title
second sect2 title
...
second intro sect1 title (eg. statemetns f to m)
fifty-second sect 2 tile
....
It's not a big difference, but we were hoping to maintain the same look
and drilling-level.
Thanks again,
Kate
"David Cramer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
01/30/2008 05:09 PM
To
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc
<[email protected]>
Subject
RE: [docbook] Is it possible to split chapters ?
> I mean validation in the sense of providing authoring assistance as you
type. The problem with validating the parent-doc is that I can't simply
click Go To
in the Validation Log when there is an error.
Yeah, that's another problem with XMetaL. With the authoring assistance
on, you rarely end up with an invalid doc, but if you accidentially delete
an element with an id you'd xrefed to, the feedback from validation is
useless if you've broken your doc into entities. For that case, I have an
"Open current document in emacs" macro that I use to open the parent doc
in emacs (+ psgml mode), validate it and quickly find and fix the errors.
You should bring up all these issues up with XMetaL support.
> So far the solution I've come up with is to change the refentry element
in docbook so that it allows multiple sect1 tags.
This is what I came up with for the declaration of refentry. Is this OK to
do in docbook?
Ok, I think I'm beginning to understand what you want to do, but now I
don't understand why. Technically, if you have file1.xml that contains:
<sect1>
<title>foo</title>
<para>foo</para>
</sect1>
<sect1>
<title>bar</title>
<para>bar</para>
</sect1>
The file is well formed xml and can be included into another file as an
entity (I've also heard of the term 'well balanced' to distinguish between
files that have a root element and those that don't). Most tools I've
encountered handle pulling in a file that's not well balanced as an entity
just fine. In fact, I just did an experiment and XMetaL also is ok with
it. I created wrapper.xml which is a book and pulled in foo.xml with the
following contents:
<section>
<title>foo</title>
<para>blah</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>foo</title>
<para>blah</para>
</section>
When I open wrapper.xml and double click on the foo.xml entity icon, it
opens foo.xml and I get all the normal assistance while editing. You could
hack it so you can add something that acts like a <div> around your sect1s
and then have the processing system remove those, but why do you need to?
David
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 2:30 PM
To: David Cramer
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [docbook] Is it possible to split chapters ?
Hi David,
Thanks for responding!
As you mention, XMetaL can only validate a wrapper file. To get around
that, I added a macro (pasted below) that looks for a processing
instruction in the format <?parent-doc parentdoc.xml?> in a document if it
doesn't have a DOCTYPE statement, then opens parentdoc.xml if necessary,
switches to it, and validates it. You put this in the
On_Before_Document_Validate event macro and it fires whenever you validate
a doc.
I mean validation in the sense of providing authoring assistance as you
type. The problem with validating the parent-doc is that I can't simply
click Go To
in the Validation Log when there is an error.
But that may not be the problem you're talking about (I'm not sure whether
you mean validation in the strick sense or in the sense of providing
authoring assistence as you type). Does largechapter.xml have a DOCTYPE
(i.e. the DTD declaration at the top?) or is that in a book.xml that in
turn contains largechapter.xml? A limitation of XMetaL's handling of
entities is that if you include files more than one level deep, then you
can't open the second level. So if you have this situation: book.xml
includes largechapter.xml includes section.xml, then you can open
book.xml, click on an entity to open largechapter.xml, do any editing you
want there with XMetaL letting you know what's allowed where, but you
can't open section.xml from largechapter.xml. This is really a
misfeature/lack of functionality in xmetal. We created a workaround for
XMetaL's entities feature by using a script similar to the one you
suggested below within the On_Application_Before_Document_Opens event.
A workaround that I can think of would be to make some fake wrapper.xml
that includes both largechapter.xml and section.xml directly. The purpose
of wrapper.xml would only be to keep xmetal happy and let you open
section.xml in a way that will let xmetal associate it with it's dtd.
So far the solution I've come up with is to change the refentry element in
docbook so that it allows multiple sect1 tags.
This is what I came up with for the declaration of refentry. Is this OK to
do in docbook?
<!ELEMENT refentry %ho; (beginpage?,
(%ndxterm.class;)?,
refentryinfo?, refmeta?, (remark|%link.char.class;)?,
refnamediv?, refsynopsisdiv?,
(sect1+|refsect1+|refsection+))
%ubiq.inclusion;>
Thus we can create a chapter like the following:
bigfilechapter.xml
<chapter>
<title> Title </title>
<para>
&file1; &file2;
</chapter>
file1.xml
<refentry>
<sect1>
sect 1 info
</sect1>
<sect1>
sect 1 info
</sect1>
</refentry>
file2.xml
<refentry>
<sect1>
sect 1 info
</sect1>
<sect1>
sect 1 info
</sect1>
</refentry>
I've got to talk with the woman who looks after our XSLT build processes
to see if
it is possible for her to strip out or ignore the refentry tags during the
build process.
Otherwise, I'll have to insert and remove the refentry tags in xmetal.
Thanks again,
Kate
"David Cramer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
01/30/2008 02:33 PM
To
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[email protected]>
cc
Subject
RE: [docbook] Is it possible to split chapters ?
As you mention, XMetaL can only validate a wrapper file. To get around
that, I added a macro (pasted below) that looks for a processing
instruction in the format <?parent-doc parentdoc.xml?> in a document if it
doesn't have a DOCTYPE statement, then opens parentdoc.xml if necessary,
switches to it, and validates it. You put this in the
On_Before_Document_Validate event macro and it fires whenever you validate
a doc.
But that may not be the problem you're talking about (I'm not sure whether
you mean validation in the strick sense or in the sense of providing
authoring assistence as you type). Does largechapter.xml have a DOCTYPE
(i.e. the DTD declaration at the top?) or is that in a book.xml that in
turn contains largechapter.xml? A limitation of XMetaL's handling of
entities is that if you include files more than one level deep, then you
can't open the second level. So if you have this situation: book.xml
includes largechapter.xml includes section.xml, then you can open
book.xml, click on an entity to open largechapter.xml, do any editing you
want there with XMetaL letting you know what's allowed where, but you
can't open section.xml from largechapter.xml. This is really a
misfeature/lack of functionality in xmetal.
A workaround that I can think of would be to make some fake wrapper.xml
that includes both largechapter.xml and section.xml directly. The purpose
of wrapper.xml would only be to keep xmetal happy and let you open
section.xml in a way that will let xmetal associate it with it's dtd.
David
// From On_Before_Document_Validate
if(ActiveDocument.doctype.systemId == ""){
Application.StopValidation();
var parentDoc =
ActiveDocument.getNodesByXPath("//processing-instruction('parent-doc')");
// Store the object representing
// the active document
var doc = Application.ActiveDocument;
if(parentDoc.length != 0){
try{
var parentDocObj = Documents.item(ActiveDocument.Path + "\\" +
parentDoc.item(0).nodeValue);
parentDocObj.validate();
if(parentDocObj.isValid){
doc.Activate();
}else{
parentDocObj.Activate();
}
}catch(e){
if(Application.FileExists(ActiveDocument.Path + "\\" +
parentDoc.item(0).nodeValue)){
var parentDocObj2 = Documents.Open(ActiveDocument.Path + "\\" +
parentDoc.item(0).nodeValue);
ActiveDocument.validate();
if(ActiveDocument.isValid){
doc.Activate();
}
}
}
}else{
Application.Alert("Can't validate a document without a DOCTYPE or a
<?parent-doc path-to-parent?>","Sorry");
}
}
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2008 10:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [docbook] Is it possible to split chapters ?
Hello,
We are using docbook 4.2 with our own customizations and our authoring
tool is XMetaL 5.0.
Currently we have a very large chapter, largechapter.xml, that contains
reference material.
This chapter is divided into sect1s. For various reasons, we'd like
to split up the contents of largechapter.xml into three files/entities
and insert the
entities into the largechapter.xml.
What we've done is created three files that contain a list of sect1s.
For example file1.xml 's hierarchy looks like the following:
<sect1>
referenceA material
</sect1>
<sect1>
referenceB material
</sect1>
...
We have no problem inserting an entity for file1.xml into largechapter.xml
and validating
largechaper.xml. The problem is that we can't validate file1.xml on its
own, because
it does not contain an over-arching root. As a result, it is difficult for
us to edit
file1.xml. Is there a tag that we could use that would fit within the
chapter tag and would
accept sect1s? Or is there another way to do this?
I know that an easy solution would be to convert all the current sect1s in
file1.xml
to sect2s and use one sect1. We'd prefer not to do this as it would add an
extra level for our users to drill down through.
Any suggestions welcome!
Thank you,
Kate
