Re: [docbook] Handling placeholders for certain texts..

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Rajal Shah <rajal@meshsoftware.com> writes:

> We have a bunch of text - where the actual information is provided much
> much later in the process.. These texts are inserted at numerous places in
> all the XML books and we need to insert placeholder for them. What is the
> best way to handle them in docbook? Is there a way to define placeholders
> for them and then assign the final/actual value for them to be replaced
> with?
> 
> Almost all the placeholders are determined at authoring time by the actual
> writer himself.. For example: we announce a bunch of release information
> with URLS for the software and documentation details. The URLs are not
> known to us up front but we include that information in tons of places in
> our docset. (much like Text entities with DTDs).
> 
> We use Docbook schemas.

One way is to use PIs as pseduo-entities, like this:

  For more information, see <?e main-doc-url ?>.

Then, write an "identity transform" XSL stylesheet with templates
to transform those PIs into whatever you want to replace them
with. For example:

  <xsl:template
    match="processing-instruction('e')[normalize-space() = 'main-doc-url']">
    <ulink url="http://foo.com/docs";>the latest documentation set</ulink>
  </xsl:template>

Then, pre-process your DocBook XML source with that stylesheet
before doing final validation and processing them for final output.

Not the prettiest way to do it, but it works.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael Smith
http://logopoeia.com/  http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/890

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