Hi, I would like to add a new element to docbook to allow for more control over conditional processing. Here is an example of what I would like to do:

<if condition="C1"> <para condition="C2"> conditions C1 and C2 are true </para> </if>

The desired behavior of this would be for the para to print only if conditions C1 AND C2 are true. I can get the desired behavior (almost) by doing this:

<para condition="C1"> <para condition="C2"> conditions C1 and C2 are true </para> </para>

...but this creates two paragraphs where I only want one and yields more whitespace than I want. Plus, I don't think this is even valid docbook.

I need this element to be available at almost any level. In other words, I might want to do something like this:

<book> ... <if condition="book_A"> <chapter condition="book_B"> ... </chapter> <chapter condition="book_C"> ... </chapter> </if> ... </book>

My plan is to create a custom DTD that defines the "if" element and references docbookx.dtd as an entity... something like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<!ENTITY % (_______________) "|if"> <--- I have no idea what should go in the blank on this line and the one below <!ELEMENT if (_______________)>

<!ENTITY % DocBookDTD PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN" "[1]http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.0/docbookx.dtd"> %DocBookDTD;

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Am I on the right track here? Is this even possible? If there is a better way, I would like to hear about it. If this is a possible solution, could someone help me fill in the blanks above?

Thank you, John

References

Visible links 1. http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.0/docbookx.dtd