RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: page chunking

[Phillip Shelton <shelton@usq.edu.au>]

From my reading of the origial question <beginpage> is exactly what he wanted as he started with a hardcopy and has made a softcopy in Docbook.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Stayton [mailto:bobs@caldera.com]
Sent: Saturday, 31 August 2002 2:55 AM
To: agon glo; docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: page chunking


On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 06:27:41AM -0400, agon glo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've converted a print book into XML using the DocBook DTD. I've inserted a 
> beginpage to indicate each new page in the print book. Now I want to chunk 
> the XML into pages based on the <beginpage> tag, so that each page in the 
> print book corresponds to an HTML file in the XSLT output.
> 
> How should I do that with the DocBook XSLT stylesheets.

You can't, unless you are willing to do some pretty heavy
customizing of the chunking stylesheet.

My first question is: how did you get <beginpage/> to start
a new page in your print output?  That is not its purpose
(although you are not alone in thinking that it is). 
See "DocBook: The Definitive Guide" for a description
of the beginpage tag (http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html).
The DocBook XSL stylesheets don't respond to <beginpage/>
unless some customization was done.

There is no facility in the chunking stylesheets for
arbitrary chunks.  A DocBook file is chunked at chapter
and section breaks.  You have some control over which
sections cause a break using stylesheet parameters.  See
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/html/index.html
for a description of the HTML stylesheet parameters.

Hope this helps.

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
Caldera International, Inc.                 fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@caldera.com