Hello all,
I am in the process of developing tech manuals in XML. the
present system uses Interleaf (a UNIX-based document publishing tool) for
authoring the manuals. We want to move to XML but at the same time
incorporate the some of the "authoring advantages" that made certain things
quite convenenient in Interleaf. I am struggling with the incorporation of
one such advantage into my XML/DTD/XSL design and I would be very grateful
of someone could suggest a way.
The DTD and XSL models are "generic" in nature, by which I mean
that we are trying to design a single DTD and XSL for all the manuals that
we propose to author in XML.
The manual is composed of text and figures.I have been able to
capture most of the text-related structure in the DTD. For the figures, i
have an element called <figure>. Basically it has character data (of the
form "Figure 1"). Whenever XSL comes across this element, it hyperlinks it
and points it to a target file (whose specs are mentioned in the attribute
list of <figure>. So a representative <figure> element is:
<figure file="E_7564.gif">
Figure 1
</figure>
The problem I am having is that this process/model is not very intelligent.
For example half way through the authoring process, if someone wished to
insert a <figure> element, she would have to change the figure numbers in
all subsequent elements. e.g.
lets say we have 5 <figure> elements for Figures 1 to 5. And then we need to
insert the sixth figure between Figure 2 and Figure 3. Thus the sixth figure
will have to be numbered 3 and all the subsequebt figure numbers will
change. Interleaf has an automated way of doing that for the user, i.e. if
you were to insert a figure, it will re-number the other figures on its own.
Is there any way I can do that in XML? Will I need to separate the text in
the <figure> element into two parts? i.e. if the contents of <figure> are
"Figure 1", will I need to separate the "Figure" from "1" and some how
automatically generate the number?
Another complication is because of the way I am displaying the figures. As I
mentioned, XSL hyperlinks the <figure> elements. When a user clicks on
"Figure 1", the relevant figure (which is a gif/jpeg file)is displayed in
separate browser window. i need to incorporate a caption at the bottom of
the image that has the following form:
"Figure 1: Description". I have two questions related to this:
(i) As I mentioned, I am displaying the image in another browser window.
Basically I have the following attribute associated with the ahref command:
"target="_new". Is it possible to display a caption (that is not part of the
image file) along with that image in the new browser window?
(ii)The caption has the following form: "Figure 1: Description". This has
the same "numbering" problem as the <figure> element. Is there a way to
model this?
I know that this message is a bit too long but I wanted to describe my
problem in detail in the hope that somebody will be able to help.
Thanks a lot,
Regards,
Dhruv
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