DOCBOOK: Re: docbook vs latex

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Robert Krüger <krueger@signal7.de> was heard to say:
| you mean by modifying the stylesheets? but then my source text would depend on 
| the output medium, wouldn't it? say I wanted to write a text 
|
| "in figure 17 you see xyz"
|
| with the current html-stylesheet I would have to write "in <xref id="..."/> 
| you see xyz". If I modified that then I would have to change the text to "in 
| figure <xref id="..."/> you see xyz" and then maybe another output medium for 
| the same docbook source that behaves like the current stylesheets would 
| output text that doesn't make sense. I just think the decision if the 
| reference resolves to a number or a word describing the referenced thing and 
| a number would have to be made in the document source (or by specification) 
| rather than in the stylesheets (as it is in latex if I'm not mistaken). what 
| do you think?  

The decision could be made on a per-document basis, with an
appropriate stylesheet customization :-). For figures, I think it always
makes sense to generate the word Figure. The edge cases are chapter
and section, I think. For those, I would never put the word in the
document, I'd rely on the stylesheet to do the right thing. You get either

  See Section 2.3 for...

or

  See 2.3 for...

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Curiosity never killed anything
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | except maybe a few hours.
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |