(dsssl) How to use modular stylesheet

Subject: (dsssl) How to use modular stylesheet
From: Dan Richter <daniel.richter@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 02 May 2003 12:24:07 +0200
Hi everyone.

When I installed OpenJade for the first time, I had a lot of information on DSSSL, but no information on the modular stylesheet provided with OpenJade. (I don't even remember how I found where it was installed on my system.) This made it difficult to understand how to do simple tasks (like change the admonition graphics). Naturally I could read the stylesheet myself (which is what I eventually did), but that was difficult at first because the stylesheet contains thousands of lines of code scattered among thirty files. I was constantly grepping (searching) to understand how this function in this file plugged into that function in that file. It took me a long time, for example, to realize that dbparam.dsl contained a bunch of configurable parameters. Sure, it makes sense after the fact, but how was I supposed to guess? It wasn't exactly easy to read through each file and try to guess what it was doing. (It would help if there was a comment at the top of each file that explained what it was for.)

Does anyone know of a reference that explains, on a beginner's level, how to change the modular stylesheet? I ask this because I'm ready to write one if there isn't one already. I think that it's perfectly normal to want to make small changes to the titlepage without writing your own stylesheet from scratch, and it would be major help just to know that the function name is book-titlepage and that it's defined in dbttlpg.dsl.

========== Dan Richter ============== mailto:Dan@xxxxxxxxx ===========
 Their reproof adds the / injury of insult to / the shame of failure.
      - Damian Conway, whose Perl script transforms computer
        error messages into haikus.


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