Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: A good tag for representing a very long URL

[Bob McIlvride <robert at cogent dot ca>]

Bang, Steinar wrote:

> I wrote earlier:
>>What would be a good DocBook tag for representing very long
>>URLs?
>>
>>I've tried <userinput> and <programlisting>, but the problem 
>>is that they become too long, when rendered by Fop.  The
>>URLs continue past the right edge of the paper.

> 
> I just tried <command>, and it gave a better result with
> Fop.  I guess it won't break on '/' or '.', but the 
> chosen font was more compact, so it fits on a single line.
> 


No offense, but you might want to take a more "correct" approach to
solving the problem.  It appears to me that what you are doing is
marking up based on expected output rather than document content.  For
example, a URL might be <userinput> if a user has to input it
somewhere, but its probably not a <programlisting> or a <command> in
"real life" unless you are dealing with a pretty unusual situation.

What you are looking for is good output, in this case a font condensed
enough to fit on one line when generated by Fop, and the <command> tag
happens to create that output.  But by doing it that way, you lose much 

of the benefit of using Docbook.

I know it means more work :-( , but the typical approach is to mark up the
URL with a tag like <filename> or something more related to what it
actually is.  To modify the output, you can give it a role attribute
like this: <filename role="URL">, and then customize your stylesheet
to assign a font for the output you need.

Also, I believe there was some discussion on this list several months
ago about wrapping URLs for PDF output, but I don't recall if it was 

via Fop, or some other toolchain.  You can check the archives.


Cheerio!

Bob

---------------------------------------
Robert McIlvride (robert@cogent.ca)
Cogent Real-Time Systems (www.cogent.ca)