Unstructured to Structured: Question about retaining paragraph formats - Re-opened

[quills at airmail.net]

I was lazy and didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so I took DOCBOOK and 
modified the EDD to make it format the way we wanted. Of course with 
heading resetting the numbering system I wanted an automatic way to 
apply the heading formats without reverting to manually setting attributes.

I accomplished this with the recursive sections available in DOCBOOK. So 
the context of Title element in levels of Section elements works. The 
context is:

If context is: {first} < Section
	If context is: Section < Section < Section < Section < Chapter
		Use paragraph format: Heading 4
	Else, if context is: Section < Section < Section < Chapter
		Use paragraph format: Heading 3
	Else, if context is: Section < Section < Section < Article
		Use paragraph format: Heading 4
	Else, if context is: Section < Section < Chapter
		Use paragraph format: Heading 2
	Else, if context is: Section < Section < Article
		Use paragraph format: Heading 3
	Else, if context is: Section < Chapter
		Use paragraph format: Heading 1
	Else, if context is: Section < Article
		Use paragraph format: Heading 2

Context, level they all work well.

Scott

Chris Despopoulos wrote:
> I thought the idea was to format via the EDD, only. Users should never
> just apply pgf formatting, because it will get lost (as you describe).
> Structure demands template dictatorship on steroids... Or rather, it
> imposes it. To add new pgf formats, and to set up users to apply them,
> you would have to:
> * Create the new formats
> * Modify the EDD and the XML to include attribu.tes
> * Use the attributes to set the current formatting for the given *element*
> * Modify the EDD to set up format rules that map your formats to the
> attribute vals
> * Store all the above in the template
>
> In theory, you could create an attribute that is a list of values, and
> each value is the name of a pgf format. Then you set up format rules for
> every pgf-level element to apply the format that matches the attribute
> value. Then do the same for char, table, and other formats??? But this
> kind of defeats the purpose of structure. The idea with structure is (as
> has already been said) to separate structure from display. You want a
> machine to make the display decisions at the last minute. And FrameMaker
> is just one such machine. By using that principle, then you can automate
> great things, like if you move a section to become a sub-section, all
> the formatting adjusts automatically.
>
> I'm sure you know all this, but maybe you need to remind the customer.
> Or maybe you need to interpret the customer request as a symptom that
> the EDD/DTD is not sufficiently specified for their project. Maybe it's
> time to address more fundamental issues?
>