Thanks Eric. I was hoping that there would be a way to avoid having to add IDs on the individual elements within the section. It can get really messy when we start xincluding at the para level.
Thank you, Kate .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Kate Wringe | Tech Writer 2| Sybase 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 | [email protected] | www.sybase.com Eric Johnson <[email protected]> 07/26/2010 03:44 PM To <[email protected]> cc Subject Re: [docbook] Sections and topics Kate, A less elegant solution would be to id all the paragraphs/lists/... in the section you want to make a chapter and then xinclude each one in a chapter element So <section> <title>...</title> <para xml:id="p1">....</para> <itemizedlist xml:id="l1">...</itemizedlist> ... <section> becomes <chapter> <title>...</title> <xi:include href="..." xpointer="p1" /> <xi:include href="..." xpointer="l1" /> ... </chapter> then your TOC would be good. The only catch is that with Xalan and DB5 you need to include the DTD spec in the prolog of the files for the xpointer scheme to work. Cheers, Eric On 7/26/2010 3:25 PM, [email protected] wrote: Hello, Here's the problem that I am increasingly running into: We have a <section> in one book that we want to reuse as a <chapter> in another book and vice versa. For example, in book A, there is section about using a tool with product A and in book B, we need to include the same information, but it must exist at the chapter level. Currently, in order to solve this problem, in Book A we create a <section> that contains the information and we xinclude this <section> into an essentially empty <chapter> element in Book B. As a result, our TOC becomes bloated and we end up with these funny chapter pages (in HTML Help) that only contain vague sentences followed by links to sections. It would be easier for us if the book structure allowed the <section> element to exist at the same level as the <chapter> element. So that, for example, the following would be valid: <book><title>titletext</title> <section>text.... </section> </book> I understand that the section element is supposed to contain information that is a section of something else and so the committee has been reluctant to see the <section> as a direct element of the <book> element. I had hoped that the <topic> element in modular DocBook would offer a better alternative. Unfortunately, from what I understand, you cannot have a topic embedded within a topic. So, even if we switched to using topics, we'd have the same problem as described above. Apologies if I am bringing up a subject that has already been addressed. Any suggestions as to how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Kate .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Kate Wringe | Tech Writer 2| Sybase 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 | [email protected] | www.sybase.com
