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Re: A good tag for representing a very long URL
- From: Bob McIlvride <robert at cogent dot ca>
- To: Docbook Apps <docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 08:52:32 -0500
- Subject: Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: A good tag for representing a very long URL
- Organization: Cogent Real-Time Systems, Inc.
- References: <194F8BB4FDB2D311B4010008C733C774020972B6@no-mail.oslo.tandbergtv.lan>
Bang, Steinar wrote:
> I wrote earlier:
>>What would be a good DocBook tag for representing very long
>>URLs?
>>
>>I've tried <userinput> and <programlisting>, but the problem
>>is that they become too long, when rendered by Fop. The
>>URLs continue past the right edge of the paper.
>
> I just tried <command>, and it gave a better result with
> Fop. I guess it won't break on '/' or '.', but the
> chosen font was more compact, so it fits on a single line.
>
No offense, but you might want to take a more "correct" approach to
solving the problem. It appears to me that what you are doing is
marking up based on expected output rather than document content. For
example, a URL might be <userinput> if a user has to input it
somewhere, but its probably not a <programlisting> or a <command> in
"real life" unless you are dealing with a pretty unusual situation.
What you are looking for is good output, in this case a font condensed
enough to fit on one line when generated by Fop, and the <command> tag
happens to create that output. But by doing it that way, you lose much
of the benefit of using Docbook.
I know it means more work :-( , but the typical approach is to mark up the
URL with a tag like <filename> or something more related to what it
actually is. To modify the output, you can give it a role attribute
like this: <filename role="URL">, and then customize your stylesheet
to assign a font for the output you need.
Also, I believe there was some discussion on this list several months
ago about wrapping URLs for PDF output, but I don't recall if it was
via Fop, or some other toolchain. You can check the archives.
Cheerio!
Bob
---------------------------------------
Robert McIlvride (robert@cogent.ca)
Cogent Real-Time Systems (www.cogent.ca)