Hi Jennifer,
Can you tell me what version of DocBook XSL your customization is based
on? The <p class="toc"> element was replaced by <div class="toc"> quite
awhile ago.
In general, the way it works is that the document is processed again in
mode="toc". Instead of the normal processing of an element to format
its content, the mode="toc" processes the element to generate just an
entry in the TOC for that element by formatting its title inside an <a>
link whose @href points to that element's content. You'll find in
html/autotoc.xsl a set of templates matching on different elements and
with the attribute mode="toc", such as this one:
<xsl:template match="preface|chapter|appendix|article" mode="toc">
<xsl:param name="toc-context" select="."/>
<xsl:call-template name="subtoc">
<xsl:with-param name="toc-context" select="$toc-context"/>
<xsl:with-param name="nodes" select="section|sect1
|bridgehead[$bridgehead.in.toc != 0]"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>
The $nodes parameter is a list of the children of the current element
that should be included as a sublist under that element's TOC line.
The template that does all the work is named "subtoc". It is in subtoc
where you will find the code that generates a line in the TOC:
<a>
<xsl:attribute name="href">
<xsl:call-template name="href.target">
<xsl:with-param name="context" select="$toc-context"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="title.markup"/>
</a>
The order of processing in subtoc is a bit confusing, because it
processes the children first into a temporary subtoc.list variable, then
outputs the TOC line followed by that subtoc list variable.
The handling of <dl> has always been a bit inconsistent across browser
versions. In more recent versions of the stylesheet there is a
stylesheet param named 'toc.list.type' which lets you replace
<dl><dd><dt> with <ul><li>. You can use CSS to turn off the bullets for
the <ul> list. Does your version of html/autotoc.xsl have a line like
this:
<xsl:element name="{$toc.list.type}">
If so, then you can replace <dl>, which might solve some of your
formatting problem.
Bob Stayton
b...@sagehill.net
On 6/30/2020 10:38 AM, Jennifer Moore wrote:
Hi folks
On a hunt for which template I need to tweak for a table of contents
in an article. A clue or two from someone more expert would help!
Context is, I've got an old copy of oXygen, and I use some
slightly-customised XSL to convert DocBook 5 to HTML, for blog posts.
I haven't needed to change any of the XSL for some years now, so I'd
semi-forgotten what I used to know about that when I set it up - which
even at the time was not a huge amount - but have re-reminded myself
of some, by re-reading bits of Bob's book and posts I made to the
lists at the time :-)
Today's problem:
When writing articles, usually I've used <section>. Now I've added
<section> within <section>.
In the auto-generated HTML table of contents, the layout now isn't
quite right - it's adding some line breaks I don't want, and losing
the font size part way through.
So I thought I'd get into the template and see what it's doing, and
see if I can work out how to adjust it to my liking.
Step 1, find out which template is doing that bit!
The post-transform HTML contains some <dd> tags to create an indent
for the lower-level sections, which seems like it could be a clue as
to what the relevant bit of XSL will look like when I find it. So I
tried searching on <dd>. But it turns out <dd> appears in quite a lot
of the XSL files, so that's not enough of a clue for me to work out
which one :-)
I do know which template is _calling_ the bit I'm interested in:
<xsl:template name="make.toc">
It sets up the "outer layer" of the ToC, and it's in an
already-slightly-customised file for ToCs which is an adaptation of, I
think, autotoc.xsl.
By looking at this previously-customised make.toc, and sticking in
some dummy classes to see what appeared where in the HTML, I was able
to deduce that the part of it that's actually doing the work (in this
case) is this:
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:if test="$nodes">
<p class="toc">
<xsl:copy-of select="$toc.title"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="$nodes" mode="toc">
<xsl:with-param name="toc-context" select="$toc-context"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>
</p>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:otherwise>
If I understand correctly, apply-templates is what tells the middle
bit of the ToC to be assembled by a different template somewhere else,
or several different templates.
I get that the with-param tag is passing a variable through to the
other templates.
select="$nodes" mode="toc" is unfamiliar to me, I'm not sure what
that's doing.
Logically, I assume that somewhere along the way, as well as creating
the layout of the list, it's also taking the <title> and the xml:id of
each <section>, and using those to assemble a link. That bit of
transformation could be happening in a different template from the one
I need to tweak, though.
Any clues about finding it?
Thanks!
Jennifer
