Hi,
I'm in the middle of the summer examinations (actually my
students ;-), and so the time to think about docbook is less than it
used to be.
Jean-Marc considered the docbook header somewhat unconfortable
and counter-intuitive (me too BTW). I thought about several plausible
alternatives and there is one that seems very reasonable.
I consider that all the layouts with command latex type are
the skeleton of the document (that becomes the special command's
feature).
The next step is to add a depth level for each command,
example:
-1 part
0 appendix
1 chapter and chapter*
2 section and section*
3 subsection and subsection*
................
Then the article header have a value 2 under article, and a
value 1 under book.
If I keep an account with the document present command depth,
if I met a command with smaller, or equal, depth then I close all the
elements till that depth.
This approach compared with the maketitle one has two
advantages: there isn't any danger to add a non title layout while in
title, my concern if you remember was with SGML layout.
The second and somewhat most notorious win is that all sgml
elements have a closing tag, like <chapter> ... </chapter>, that is
missing now.
Why is this a big win? Well XML requires all the elements to
have end tags while SGML doesn't force you to (if the end tag could be
infered from the document structure). There is a XML version of
docbook so this means, with this alternative that lyx could write
correct XML docbook.
My question is how to insert this in the textclass file?
LatexParam isn't a good choice since I need it to pass some
parameters in the case of the stared sections, for example, and that
is the right syntax for it.
Any idea?
José
