I know that you have already had a good deal of response to this, but you asked about potential solutions and there is one I haven't seen mentioned.
We sometimes have requirements for short documents and have set up the transforms to use an article as the root element for this type of document. If you need a title page more closely resembling a book than an article (which has a much simpler title page by default) and want to preserve both the traditional article title page and a book-style title page for articles, you can use a role attribute on the articles that you want processed like a book to indicate that. As an alternative, you can have the transform check to see if the article is the root element and decide what type of title page to use based on that characteristic. Articles allow you to use the section elements directly as children of the root element instead of having to include the chapter element in the hierarchy. This would meet your requirement without needing to change the DocBook schema and can be done now rather than having to wait for DocBook to change. Regards, Larry Rowland From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 1:26 PM To: DocBook Technical Committee; [email protected] Subject: [docbook] Sections and topics 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
