Re: docbook crossrefs

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 10:12, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> Hi Malcolm, 
> 
> comments below 
> 
> On Mon, 2002-12-09 at 10:23, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote: 
> [snip] 
> > > The question is: how can I write docbook which generates correct html
> > > links if it is translated to html by the help browser ? Is this
> > > possible without any G2-specific extension ? I don't rellay understand
> > > the ins and outs of the problem but I know what I want to do: I want
> > > to be able to click on the links when I cross-ref a function from my
> > > documentation and get the function's API doc be displayed by the
> > > application.
> > 
> > Right at the moment, this is not possible. The initial problem you have
> > is that you do not know where the API documentation is installed. The
> > solution is probably to install an OMF file with each piece of API
> > documentation and register it with scrollkeeper so that something like
> > Yelp can find the document. That still leaves the problem of how to get
> > Yelp to extract the right document, but let's cross one hurdle at a
> > time.
> I'd say the question is: what does the cross-ref look like in the source
> document ? Is it a structured string which contains two parts: 
> - target document 
> - target item within document 
> 
> In which case this makes our source xml not compatible with docbook (am
> I wrong here ?) 

There are enough linking tags in DocBook that it should just be a matter
of figuring out which one has the right semantics.  Then, of course,
there's the problem that we don't have any tools to make the links
actually come out as something useful.

[snip]
> Finally, since I have started dreaming openly, I'd like to point out
> that the coolest thing we could do ever would be to have our own xsl:fo
> xslt for xml docbook to render our source xml to pdf or ps with working
> cross-refs in the resulting document. But, yeah, this is really a dream.

If you convert to html-nochunks, and run the resulting HTML file through
HTMLdoc you'll get a PDF with links that work.  This is the most
reliable method I've found so far.
	Greg

-- 
Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>