How to import a set of text entities into a DocBook document?
Hi, all...
We have a large collection of potential text entities that we'd like to be able to import into any DocBook document with Arbortext. For example, for cross references to the many books in our library, we have 5-letter book IDs. If the writer uses an entity for the book ID instead of writing out the book title, we can change the book title and the writer does not have to fix it in multiple places. We need to be able to maintain a file with these entity definitions and import these definitions into any DocBook document. We would also need to reimport from time to time to reflect changes to the book titles. How can we do this?
Thx
Steve Fogel
Information Architect, Oracle Database Information Development
Since you mention text entities, I assume that you are using the SGML version of docbook. If I understand what you want, you can implement a text entity library as a private declaration. Just put the entity declaration in the DOCTYPE as shown in red. Use the 5-letter book IDs. You might have to adjust the SGML capacities in the SGML declaration file if there are too many books. I did something similar and had to break the list of entities into three separate files :
Andy's solution will work if you're using SGML or an XML DTD. If you are using a schema, you're "supposed" to be able to include a DOCTYPE in the schema and declare the entities there.
If you are using an XML DTD you may get capacity error when Epic parses the file, but it will not cause you any problems. The Army's 40051 DTD has several large text entity files it calls and Epic routinely gives a LITLEN warning, but still will process the information.
Our entire system, which is XML Schema 1.0, uses text entities. Every one of our documents has a definition similar to this:
%textents; ]>
The authors have no control over the "text.ent" file, which is stored completely apart from the XML content. This setup works just fine with XML Schema.
How about maintaining your definition a magnificent, yest modest, Oracle Database and having the XSL connect thereto using, perhaps, Saxon's SQL extension?
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FYI - I remember several years ago when we were using an SGML doctype with many text entities, that when we would try to compile the doctype for any change, Adept Editor would complain that we had exceeded the string capacity of Adept Editor. We had to reduce the number of text entities down to a quantity that would allow Adept Editor to compile the doctype without exceeding string capacity. This was not a capacity that was adjustable via an SGML setting in the declarations file. This was a hard-coded limit in Adept Editor's core code.
Today, this limit may not exist or is so high that it doesn't matter. Of course, if you are not using SGML you should be OK since doctype compilation is not an issue.
