Hi Kate,

As an addition to the fine suggestions that have been provided, this comes to my
mind:

You could keep doing what you're doing with the dummy wrapper sections but have
an intermediary xslt step that promote the sections. You would do this after
resolving the xincludes but before passing the document to the DocBook xsls.

The xslt would change this:

<chapter role="dummy"> <title/> <section id="someid"><title>Real title</title><!-- content --></section> </chapter>

To:

<chapter id="someid"><title>Real title</title><!-- content --></chapter>

Since the chapter and section content models are so similar, you shouldn't have
a problem and the result will be a normal looking toc in your output.

Something of a hack I guess, but it should work.

David

________________________________ From: Kate...@sybase.com [mailto:Kate...@sybase.com] Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 2:26 PM To: DocBook Technical Committee; docb...@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: [docbook] Sections and topics

Hello,

Here's the problem that I am increasingly running into: We have a <section> in
one book that we want to reuse as a <chapter> in another book and vice versa.

For example, in book A, there is section about using a tool with product A and
in book B, we need to include the same information, but it must exist at the
chapter level. Currently, in order to solve this problem, in Book A we create a <section> that
contains the information and we xinclude this <section> into an essentially
empty <chapter> element in Book B. As a result, our TOC becomes bloated and we
end up with these funny chapter pages (in HTML Help) that only contain vague
sentences followed by links to sections.

It would be easier for us if the book structure allowed the <section> element to
exist at the same level as the <chapter> element. So that, for example, the following would be valid: <book><title>titletext</title> <section>text.... </section> </book>

I understand that the section element is supposed to contain information that is
a section of something else and so the committee has been reluctant to see the
<section> as a direct element of the <book> element. I had hoped that the
<topic> element in modular DocBook would offer a better alternative.
Unfortunately, from what I understand, you cannot have a topic embedded within a topic. So, even if we switched to using
topics, we'd have the same problem as described above.

Apologies if I am bringing up a subject that has already been addressed. Any
suggestions as to how to solve this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, Kate

Kate Wringe | Tech Writer 2| Sybase 445 Wes Graham Way, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6R2 Canada | Tel: (519) 883-6838 |
kate...@sybase.com | www.sybase.com