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RE: [dita] Book title in bookmap

From: Kevin Farwell
To: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:59:00 -0000

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Subject: RE: [dita] Book title in bookmap

From: "Farwell, Kevin" <[email protected]>
To: "Robert D Anderson" <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 20:01:25 -0400

Hi,

Yes, I guess I tend toward option four. I also question the other
examples you give. Generally, I don't like text in book files, but I
also don't understand some of them.

I don't understand what text would go between topics. Is it chapter
grouping text, like "This chapter is about..." or is it actually between
sections of an eventual chapter? I'd need to see an example of this to
tell for sure, but it seems to me that would be one more topic
referenced in the book, either as a parent of the section topics or a
sibling between them.

I also have a question on book specific index markers. Does that mean
there is one case where you would want readers to find content and one
where you wouldn't? I don't see why you would not include index entries
that are related to content that is included. Are the other locations
other books, or other deliverables? 

Copyright statements, along with front matter kinds of things like
conventions pages, regulatory statements, compliance statements, safety
statements, target audience, disclaimers, etc. seem like the perfect
thing to share between lots of books. When I think of boilerplate text I
don't plan to paste it into every document I publish. Should boilerplate
text get updated, I don't want to track corrections through all of the
places it's been published. I'd rather go to one file and fix it.

I don't have a counter for the special index title example, but I also
can't really see it. Editorial choices aren't generally arbitrary. Can
you provide a concrete example? Also, it occurs to me that there
shouldn't a consideration for one book. There may be a situation like
the one you describe, but it would be over a class of books. Only in the
case of failure does a single project not convert to a program. This
relates to the other examples as well. Is it efficient to make the same
changes in a number of books as the program expands? 

The index example led me to another part of the book map, and I have
another question. In the booklists description, the following sentence
appears. "The placement and order of the lists in the resulting book is
determined not by location in the bookmap but by an external style
preference setting (whether the list of figures comes before the list of
tables, for example)." How does that setting work? Is it a parameter
list of some kind?

Thanks,
Kevin