[publican-list] Organization issue and multiple docs

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 11:17 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> I'm working on what will ultimately be a rather large amount of docs.  At
> present I've got a set.  The set has a bunch of books by topic and the
> books have a bunch of chapters, sometimes by audience (sysadmins,
> managers, end users)
> 
> I'm not quite happy with how it's turned out and trying to decide whether
> to organize by audience, or by topic has been difficult.  I was wondering
> if publican can make multiple docs at once.  This would allow me to have
> the one monolithic set I have now, but also smaller sets that contain just
> sections relevant to the audience.

DocBook is capable of handling a @role attribute, like:

  <chapter id="ch-something">
    <para role="admin;manager">
      <!-- Stuff for admins and managers only, blah blah -->
    </para>
    <para role="users">
      <!-- Stuff for users, blah blah -->
    </para>
  </chapter>

That @role attribute is sometimes called (IIRC) "document profiling,"
and there's information about it in the XSLT Handbook and the DocBook
guide, I think.

I'm certain that RH Docs has used this for works like the Installation
Guide where a specific procedure changes depending on, say, the
architecture on which you're installing RHEL.

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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