Re: DOCBOOK: Glossary database

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Jorge Godoy <godoy@conectiva.com.br> was heard to say:
| On Wed, Jan 26, 2000 at 03:53:15PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
| > There's code in the DSSSL stylesheets to support doing this with
| > bibliographys. Adapting it to glossarys doesn't seem impossible.
| 
| Where can I look for them? I'm not (yet) a DSSSL hacker, but I'm

Look in the dbbibl.dsl file in the DocBook stylesheet distribution.
The relevant condition is biblio-filter-used.

| studying it a little. The problem is that I couldn't find a list of
| valid DSSSL "commands". It's something like using only what I've seen
| around and doing nothing more than what was already done. :-(

The spec is online at ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/DSSSL/

| > | How would I markup which glossterms are needed, if it's possible? 
| > 
| > Use <glossterm> to surround the terms in your document.
| 
| I thought about that. :-) That was what I was doing (if it wasn't the
| correct way, it would be easier to change it to something else). 

BTW, I toyed with implementing this and decided it was a bit
more difficult than Bibliographies. The problem is that
glossterms don't always point to the definition, so you'd have
to do all sorts of string comparisons. Might be rather expensive.

If you're writing in XML, I'd be tempted to make an external
tool that read your source document and your glossary database
and built the appropriate glossary. So you wouldn't have to make
the stylesheets calculate it every time.

(You could do this if you're working in SGML, too, but parsing the
source documents wouldn't be as easy (or robust).)

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Fast. Cheap. Well. Pick two.
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | 
Member, DocBook Editorial Board    |