[Techtalk] Keeping legal notices in Docbook.

[Megan Golding]

At 1/21/02 12:22 AM, Mary Gardiner asked:

 * Produce text without an HTML intermediate step. And will it include
   URLs? If not, is there any way to generate HTML contains the external
   URLs, but not any document internal URLs (since they're useless when
   you convert to text with links -dump anyway).

As far as I've ever seen, general recommendations suggest using an HTML
target, opening the file in Lynx or another text-based browser, and saving
the resulting info. So, no, I don't know of a direct way (using jade) to get
text-only output. 

Unfortunately, the browser-save-as-text method doesn't solve your problem of
seeing the URL's when links appear. Control over whether a URL is displayed
when a link is shown is something in the stylesheets. I've looked through
the "*.dsl" files and still can't locate this (but must be going crazy, b/c
I remember seeing it before).

 * Is there any way to get jade/docbook.dsl to produce an output file
   named anything other than t1.html? jade's documentation is lying
   about the function of the -o flag as far as I can see, because no
   matter what I put there, t1.html it is!

Yes, this is also a stylesheet thing. Jade refers to a DSSSL stylesheet and
gets all its transformation directives from that file. The cool thing about
DSSSL is that they are cascading (like CSS) -- you can set up a LinuxChix
customization and point it to the DSSSL stylesheets already in use. The
LinuxChix customization layer will override the base stylesheets only where
you have entries in the LinuxChix file. Here's the entry:
(define %use-id-as-filename%  #f)
Set that "#f" to "#t" and you'll start getting html filenames based on the
"id" attribute you use for chapters and sections.

 * Is there any way to force the output to contain the contents of any
   <legalnotice></legalnotice> tags? Jenn is using them in the FAQs, but
   they don't show up in the output, which is rather a nuisance. It
   would be nice to have text and HTML versions that actually include
   the licencing.

Another stylesheet thing. The stylesheets start at the root element (book,
article, etc.) and process the directives in the "*.dsl" files. Greping
through the "*.dsl" files should show you where under the appropriate root
(book? article?), the legalnotice is not showing up. The trick is to copy
that relevant code and put it in your LinuxChix stylesheet customization and
set the legalnotice to display. 
(define %generate-legalnotice-link%  #f)
Set the "#f" to "#t" and I think this'll put the legalnotice on the page for
you.

I'm happy to help out -- if you like, just point me to the documents and I
can look at the stylesheets for you.

Regards,
Meg Golding