[docbook-apps] how to add "extra" meta-info to a docbook document

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at mindspring dot com>]

  i'm sure there's an accepted way of doing this, and i'm open
to suggestions.

  i'm writing a number of open source-related manuals using
docbook, and i'd like to use the same DB file, along with a
custom written stylesheet, to generate brochures and web pages
representing outlines for those manuals as well as the manuals
themselves.

  for example, each manual represents a course, and the brochure
should list, one course per page, 

  course synopsis
  pre-requisites
  course outline

  now, i know i can use a pretty straightforward stylesheet to extract the
chapters and, say, first-level sections to generate an outline.  but is
there a reasonable way to embed stuff like the synopsis and pre-requisites
in the manual docbook file itself?

  stuff like the synopsis will *never* be part of the printed manual,
only part of the brochure or the web page.  obviously, i could keep
an independent file for stuff like this on a per-manual basis, but
i thought it would be niftier to have *everything* related to a manual
in the manual file itself, and just extract the parts i care about,
depending on what i'm trying to generate.

  in short, what's the easiest way to embed non-DB info in a DB
file?  short of actually extending the DTD to incoroprate that?

rday

p.s.  i don't actually need to validate the input file against the
docbook DTD, so i know i can just invent new tags and use them any
way i want, but i know that's kind of tacky.  thoughts?


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