Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Losing header rule when section titles are too long

[Bob Stayton <bobs at caldera dot com>]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 03:59:05PM +1030, Paul A. Hoadley wrote:
> I seem to be replying to my own posts a lot lately.  :-)
> 
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 06:13:07PM +1030, Paul A. Hoadley wrote:
> 
> > When the <title> of a <sect?> gets too long to fit on a single line
> > in the middle cell of the table that makes up the page header, it
> > flows to a second line, making the table too tall, and hence pushing
> > the border-bottoms of the cells out of view with it.  I assume this
> > has been discussed before, though could not find a solution in the
> > list archive.  Can I do something as simple as truncate the length
> > of the middle cell's contents when it's created in pagesetup.xsl
> > (though I guess the followup question is where would I truncate it)?
> > Does anyone have a nicer solution for this, or should I shorten my
> > section titles?
> 
> Someone suggested (off-list) that I use <titleabbrev> -- I am quite
> embarrassed I did not think of this myself.  I now want to add a
> customisation to use <titleabbrev> instead of <title> in the running
> headers, if the former element exists.  I just can't seem to see where
> to do this: I started at the header.table template in pagesetup.xsl,
> and I'm now in sections.xsl.  Where is the section.heading template
> getting the $title parameter from?  I am thinking I want to set $title
> to titleabbrev in preference to title -- is this the right approach?
> 
> I am happy to press on, but I assume this is a wheel someone has
> invented before.

Invented, but not finished, it seems.  8^)

The XSL stylesheets should be using titleabbrev for running
headers and footers by default, I think.  But they are
not.  If you read the description and processing
expectations of titleabbrev in DocBook the Definitive
Guide, it basically says that is exactly what titleabbrev
was meant for.

I'd file a Feature Request for this on the DocBook
SourceForge site (or I will if you can't).

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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