| Making specific references to chapter numbers in other books is
frowned on in our tech writing area, since books tend to have a
long life time and get updated a number of times over the years.
Even if you do it symbolically, at the point where the book goes
into print the reference gets frozen, and a year later it may be
misleading if the book that it is referencing has gone through a
revision. The recommended procedure is to refer the reader to a
discussion of the subject in the other book.
If you are getting an <include> of a file of <define_symbols> to
work for you, you are skating on thin ice. The idea of isolating
the <define_symbol> tags in a separate file is a good idea, but
you should refeerence that file with a /SYMBOL qualifier on the
command line, not with an <include> in one of the GNC files.
If you don't mind making specific references into another book,
nothing prevents you from writing the whole thing in the text
argument of the <define_symbol> tag:
<define_symbol>(mumbledy\Chapter 4. Loading the Definition Files)
We toyed with the idea of allowing the <reference> tag to specify
another argument which would be the CRF file of another book, so
we did think about your problem. But because that would lead to
the type of specific results that are frowned on, this idea got
pushed to the bottom of the priority list.
When we go to putting all the books on line, and allow you to
"click" on such a reference and get transported into the other book,
we'll need such a feature, but in this case, the binding of the
symbol to the object in the other book will be done when you click,
not when you run the book through DOCUMENT. THus, each book will
be updateable, and provided the writers don't change the symbol
names, the click will still get you where you want to go. Today
a click will get you to chapter 4 of the other book and tomorrow
the same click may get you to chapter 5 of the other book, if
overnight someone installed the update of the other book...
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RE .1
The tags look like <DEFINE_SYMBOL>(symbol\chapter_name).
So far, I'm only defining the chapter names. I use the same
chapter names in both manuals and I want to define those chapters
only once.
RE .2
You are right, it's a little bit dangerous to use references
to another book. But if you run both books trough DOCUMENT every
time, you haven't any problems. It seems to be so that I can't use
CRF-file (yet) and that's why I'm going to remove those references.
Luckily there are only few of them.
I hope that you will some day allow usage of CRF-files for
referencing. There is always the problem which is stated in the
.2 reply. And how would it be possible to make references to
another book and from the other one to the first one ? I think
it would be possible if you can use the same CRF-file either
by appending data to CRF-file or by allowing to define more than
one book in profile file (same CRF-file). The last choice would
be more flexible and it would be easy to maintain all books up to date.
With one DCL command you can create many books and the problem
stated in the reply .2 would not be happend.
Raimo
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