[publican-list] Proposed changes to Book_Info.xml

[David O'Brien]

Jeff Fearn wrote:
> A bug has been raised about how the titles currently differ between 
> the HTML and PDF outputs, this has lead to a review to the way the 
> Book_Info.xml files are structured.
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=456497
>
> Currently the usage is:
>
> title: the name of the Product the book is about.
> subtitle: the actual title of the book.
> issuenum: the version of the Product the book is about.
> productnumber: the release of the book for this Product version.
>
> This is somewhat confusing and I'd like to change it to:
>
> productname: the name of the product this book is about.
> productnumber: the version of the product this book is about.
> pubsnumber: the release of this book for this products version. (Only 
> used for rpm)
> title: the title of this book.
> subtitle: a secondary title for this book.
>
> This would then lead to a restructuring of the way the titles are 
> displayed.
>
> The cover page display would be:
>
> Top of page centered, font size 2em, colored block: ProductName 
> ProductVersion
> Below that block, centered, font size 2em: BookTitle
> Below that, centered, font size 1.8em: BookSubTitle
>
> The centering is because the current layout makes it hard to separate 
> the titles from the content, this small changes highlights the titles 
> and brings the HTML and PDF in to alignment.
>
> No feedback means I am right and should proceed however I want :D
>
> Cheers, Jeff.
>
Mostly that looks fine to me, but not 100% sure about the pubsnumber. 
Why would you only use that for the rpm? If you provide updates to the 
original release of a manual, but where there are no changes to the 
product, how is this indicated? Only in the Revision History? Can we not 
provide something more obvious?

I admit to not spending much time looking at the final output, though, 
such as size and placement of titles, etc.; that's not my "forte".  ^^

Any thoughts on whether we should effect any changes to RH entity names 
at the same time? A bit more work involved, to be sure, but I always 
like to raise the consistency questions. We have a bit of a mixture at 
present. Some that I use look like:
<!ENTITY TITLE "Installation and Deployment Guide">
<!ENTITY PRODUCT "Red_Hat_Enterprise_IPA">
<!ENTITY PRODNAME "Red Hat Enterprise IPA">
<!ENTITY VER "1.0">
<!ENTITY PRODVER "&PRODNAME; &VER;">
<!ENTITY FULLTITLE "<citetitle>&PRODNAME; &TITLE;</citetitle>">

I bet Jeff's next salary that every other non-IPA .ent file is different :-)

cheers

-- 

David O'Brien
IPA Content Author
Red Hat Asia Pacific

"We couldn't care less about comfort. We make you feel good."
Federico Minoli CEO Ducati Motor S.p.A.