Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Chunking question

[Bob Stayton <bobs at caldera dot com>]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 02:13:24PM -0500, Jeff Beal wrote:
> Customizing the chunking to the extent you appear to want is quite
> difficult, especially if you want to maintain reasonable previous/next/up
> links in the output.  I had a project where I was converting a set of
> documentation from HTML into DocBook, and one of my requirements that the
> chunking remained the same as it was in the original.  Well, in the
> original, the authors didn't follow any rules in chunking, so there are
> places where I needed to chunk five sections deep and others where there
> were only two, but that second level did have what would be considered
> sub-sections.
> 
> What I did (and it breaks a few rules of structured editing), was to set the
> chunk.section.depth parameter high enough that any section-type element
> would chunk.  I then used <bridgehead/> elements to create sub-sections
> within a chunk.  It's not a perfect solution.  In fact, I'm not a big fan of
> it myself.  However, it does give the author very explicit control of where
> to break the HTML pages.

There is another way of manually controlling chunking, but it
is rather high maintenance.  

Norm provides the maketoc.xsl and chunktoc.xsl stylesheets
in the html directory.  They let you create a table of
contents file that can be edited and then used to control
chunking.  They are described in this message:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200202/msg00080.html

(the message says to check CVS, but they are now distributed).

When you remove entries from the generated toc file, they
no longer become separate chunks.  You must have an id
attribute on any element in your document that is to start
a chunk.

Having to re-edit the toc file each time you make a change
to your document structure would be high maintenance.
There was another message that suggested the use of PIs
in the document, but I don't think it was ever implemented.

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/200209/msg00007.html

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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