Carrying the Title of a Book forward [was Variables]

[Bernard Aschwanden]

Hi all:

Many people have discussed the idea of using variables or <$volnum> to drive the title of a book into multiple files. There are benefits and drawbacks to each and I'll leave that method alone for now.

(as an aside, if you do a lot of importing of variables--or any formats--check into http://www.frameexpert.com/plugins/importformatsspecial/index.htm for a great utility)

What I often do is build the title in a file, such as "cover.fm" and then build a folder structure along the lines of the following example:

\book_folder\

cover.fm

germany.fm

england.fm

finland.fm

mexico.fm

russia.fm



Each file for each nation is based on the same template. In the template I view the master pages and in the footer/header of each page I place an xref to the BookName paragraph that I put into the cover. Then all I ever need to do is update cover.fm and update xrefs. In doing so I get a fully dynamic link that jumps to the cover (should I need that) and I also get a complete and dynamic way to update the title.

Hope that helps as well.

I'll demonstrate that in the presentation I do at the DITA conference to anyone who wants to see it. Additionally, I'm doing a whole set of online training sessions include some on template development in which I will show this. For details, see:
http://www.publishingsmarter.com/pages/teach/conference_event.html

You can follow links from there.


Bernard



Bernard Aschwanden
Publishing Technologies Expert
Publishing Smarter

bernard at publishingsmarter.com 

www.publishingsmarter.com