Douglas Silas wrote:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=616142
I have a request for consideration for a controversial feature that has two
important and related use cases:
* I have a very large book to publish, but due to (various) reasons,
only want
to publish part of it. The content is all interlinked with xrefs,
though, so I
cannot build the book unless I manually change all of them.
* I am working on a single chapter of a very large book that takes up to 2
minutes or more to build (with publican 1/2+, which is still a huge
improvement), and to view my work (to review as a draft, or to check the
formatting), I would like to build a single chapter. However, due to the
rigor
inherited by xrefs, I cannot.
The best (and completely hypothetical) solution for these cases would be if
xrefs were more like xi:includes:
For more information about firewalls, refer to <xref>
<linkend>some_unique_id</linkend>
<fallback>the <citetitle pubwork="section">Firewalls</citetitle>
section of
the Red Hat Enterprise Linux <citetitle>Security
Guide</citetitle>.</fallback></xref>
I suppose technically that the mix of inline and block-level elements there
wouldn't work, but that's the idea.
In lieu of such a useful construct, I am wondering if:
* there is any interest on behalf of others in building only part of a
book;
* there are any suggestions for what to replace xrefs to nonexistent
targets
with; and,
* this is a good idea or a bad one.
This feature could be abused by users saying, "Well, if the book doesn't
build
because of broken xrefs, just turn on directive ignore_xrefs in
publican.cfg."
If this were a feature, publican could warn that it converted linkends
A, B and
C in X and Y chapters into ____ elements. Perhaps this could be a
feature that
could only be enabled on the command line, and thus could not set for
entire
books. I think its utility is undeniable, though, as it would save many
of us
time and effort. I currently cannot publish completed chapters of an
overall
500+ page book I am editing (that is interlinked heavily with xrefs)
without
either changing all the xrefs manually in a publication branch, or
writing a
hack of a script that replaces these xrefs with <remark>s or some other
element. I've done the latter out of necessity, but it is almost certainly
better if this problem is discussed on the list, where we could perhaps
come up
with a single band-aid instead of many individual ones :-)
You could probably use conditions to achieve this.
e.g.
<book>
<xi:include href="chapter1.xml" condition="chapter1"/>
<xi:include href="chapter2.xml" condition="chapter2"/>
...
</book>
chapter1.xml
<chapter id="chapter_one">
<title>chapter one</title>
<para>
See <xref linkend="chapter_two" condition="chapter2"/>
</para>
chapter2.xml
<chapter id="chapter_two">
<title>chapter two</title>
<para>
If life serves you lemons, make me dessert!
</para>
...
Then in your publican.cfg you just set the conditions for the chapters
you want included.
If you REALLY want to have an alternative text, then have two
conditions, e.g. chapter2 to use if chapter two is set and not_chapter2
for when chapter 2 isn't set. You could specify every chapter in the cfg
file and prepend 'not_' to the chapters you want excluded.
e.g.
chapter1.xml
<chapter id="chapter_one">
<title>chapter one</title>
<para>
See <xref linkend="chapter_two" condition="chapter2"/><remark
condition="not_chapter2">Link deliberately omitted for this build</remark>
</para>
Cheers, Jeff.
--
Jeff Fearn <[email protected]>
Software Engineer
Engineering Operations
Red Hat, Inc
Freedom ... courage ... Commitment ... ACCOUNTABILITY
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