Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Components, book-start? and page-number-restart?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Ian Castle <bb+lists.docbook-apps@looksystems.co.uk> was heard to say:
| The problem is that quite often the <preface> will be the first
| component in the book. This means that book-start? will return true and
| the page number of the preface will be reset to (i).

Yeah. That doesn't seem right.

| So, in a book which consists of chapters (with a preface or two at the
| start, appendix or two at the end) I would expect that the call to
| "first-chapter?" would suffice. The only problem would be with books
| that are not made up of chapters - for example, references (?). In this
| case I would expect that book-start? would not necessarily be the best
| thing to do - but something like, say, first-reference? (possibly a test
| to see if there are any chapters...).
| 
| Anyway, I can't see a particularly good reason for keeping in the call
| to "book-start?". Is there one?

You can't simply remove it, because of the case you already mentioned,
books consisting of references, parts, or articles. However, if you want
to replace book-start with appropriately defined (first-reference?,
(first-part?, and (first-article? calls, I'd be happy to apply that
patch :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The stone fell on the pitcher? Woe
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | to the pitcher. The pitcher fell
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | on the stone? Woe to the
                                   | pitcher.--Rabbinic Saying