Local TOCs in structured documents

[Lynne A. Price]

Good morning,

   Since there's an ongoing thread on chapter TOCs, I thought I'd share an 
idea I had recently. In a book with numerous chapters, it is a pain to 
remember to generate the local TOC for each chapter. A minor tweak to the 
EDD, and a slightly strained structure, allows me to build them in a single 
book.

   In particular, I've defined a choice attribute on the chapter element 
that serves as a code name, with arbitrary values (say, flower names), 
making sure that I've defined more values than there will ever be chapters 
in an actual book. The EDD then assigns context labels for each element 
that I want in the chapter TOC based on the possible values of this 
attribute. For example, Section, Subsection, and Subsubsection might each 
have context labels Daisy, Tulip, Rose, and so forth. If I use a generic 
Section element that can be nested within itself, I might give it context 
labels like Daisy1, Tulip1, Rose1 for the first level, Daisy2, Tulip2, 
Rose2 for the second level, etc.

   If I assign the code name Daisy to a particular chapter, I set up its 
TOC to include only Section(Daisy), Subsection(Daisy), and so on. I've used 
code names instead of numbers because I don't want to associate the 
selection with the order of chapters in the book. With the code names, I 
can reorder the chapters in the book, or add new ones in the middle without 
the identification becoming confusing. I could have used a unique ID 
instead of a choice attribute, but I wanted the EDD to list the values used 
by the context rules that assign the context labels.
Not very efficient--FM scans every file in the book to build the TOC for 
each chapter, but it works.

   In practice, I actually assigned all the context labels to the Title 
element rather than the Section element. My Title element doesn't have an 
ID attribute, but the Section element does. Thus, I can use the context 
labels on the Title element to set up the chapter TOCs without having them 
clutter up the cross-reference dialog box. I use context labels on Section 
for cross-referencing.

         --Lynne


Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com            http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505      cell phone: (510) 421-2284