Re: [Boost-docs] [quickbook] Breaking a line

Subject: Re: [Boost-docs] [quickbook] Breaking a line
From: Edward Diener (eldiener_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-25 22:40:07

On 1/25/2011 3:39 PM, Daniel James wrote:
> On 25 January 2011 18:15, John Maddock<boost.regex_at_[hidden]>  wrote:
>>> FWIW there should be a way to define an XSLT transform for a certain
>>> Boostbook tag to use the appropriate HTML+CSS combo for properly
>>> displaying a "broken line" without having to use the<br/>  tag in
>>> HTML. I just don't know enough Boostbook to be able to do that though.
>>
>> It's only really possible to do this via a processing instruction hack:
>> http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/LineBreaks.html
>
> I really should get round to dealing with processing instructions.
>
> For anyone who doesn't know, the way quickbook deals with newlines is
> to use a '<sbr/>' tag. These are only valid in very specific locations
> (only command synopsis and BNF notation I think) - certainly not in
> paragraphs which is where they appear in quickbook generated
> documentation. The docbook xsl conversion to html does support them
> but there's a good chance that they won't work elsewhere.
>
> http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/sbr.html
>
> The warnings probably could be less noisy and less harsh, but because
> of this I wouldn't want to go warning free, since this is a potential
> problem.

It is still utterly beyond me why Docbook considers paragraphs part of 
structure but does not consider lines as part of structure.

I am going to solve the problem of breaking a line by making a new 
paragraph each time I would have had a line break. The extra blank line 
will look poor compared to a simple line break, but when one deals with 
the people ( the docbook designers ) who make rules which seem idiotic 
to me it is easier and less time consuming to play by those rules than 
to try to change anybody's mind.