Mike,
On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 01:35:36PM -0800, Mike Cooper wrote:
I'm trying to create a number of reference (UNIX) man pages for
seperate commands. I need to have these each be a standalone document
so I can create UNIX *roff man page files (using docbook2X), but also
I need to create a single master "Reference Guide" which includes all
of the otherwise standalone reference docs. What's the best way of
doing this?
I've had a lot of success using XInclude[0] to compile master documents
from well-formed smaller documents, and it gives me a great deal of
flexibility in choosing what information I want from the component
documents.
Your case is particularly straightforward, as you don't have to do any
complex XPointer-based selection[1]. The power to do some pretty gnarly
data extraction is there, however. It should look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN" [
<!ENTITY mc "<trademark>MagniComp</trademark>">
<!ENTITY si "<trademark>SysInfo</trademark>">
<!ENTITY mcsysinfohcf SYSTEM "mcsysinfohcf.sgm">
]>
<!-- $Revision$ -->
<book>
<bookinfo>
...
</bookinfo>
<reference>
<title>Reference Pages</title>
<xi:include xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2003/XInclude";
href="mcsysinfohcf.sgm"/>
</reference>
</book>
The only potential problem with this is that it is not a core-xml only
solution; it involves XInclude processing. Using a recent version of
libxml2, I would "expand" the XIncludes with:
xmllint --xinclude master.xml
There are definitely other XInclude processors available[2].
The master document, as it stands, will not validate until after you do
XInclude processing (because of the introduction of the xi:include
element) unless you add a declaration for the element. See Bob's book
for details[3].
Take care,
John L. Clark
[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-framework/
[2] http://www.w3.org/XML/2002/09/xinclude-implementation
[3] http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ValidXinclude.html#XincludeDTD