Manual

Manual is a general purpose document type biased to software documentation. It is defined in the InfoPrism DTD.

The Structure of a Manual Document

InfoPrism documents consist of an optional preamble, the document header and the main part.

The Preamble

The preamble contains general processing settings for the current document.
DEFLANG
Changes the primary language of the document to the value given by the PRIMARY attribute. Valid values are EN (English, the default) and DE (German).
MAKEINDEX
Defines an index. The required attribute NAME serves as unique identifier for the specific index. The corresponding INDEX and INSERTINDEX elements refer to this identifier.

Classifying the Document

CATEGORY
A class to which the document belongs to, e.g. "Document Processing" for this document.
NAME
A short and terse specification of the document, e.g. InfoPrism for this document.
TOPIC
A short description of the subject of the document, e.g. "Translating SGML documents" for this document.
These elements have only an impact on Texinfo documents.

The Document Header

Global information about the document is stored in the document header. Things such as the document title, the author and the date of the last modification of the document are placed here. A document header may look like the following one:
[lt    ]&DOCTYPE manual PUBLIC "-//Witware//DTD InfoPrism//EN;[gt    ]&;[lt    ]&ITL;[gt    ]&anual Exampl;[lt    ]&TITL;[gt    ]&;[lt    ]&UTHOR EMAIL="rumble@chaos.de;[gt    ]&ina Rumbl;[lt    ]&AUTHO;[gt    ]&;[lt    ]&TAMP YEAR=1997 MONTH=4 DAY=7 HOUR=15 MINUTE=1 SECS=37 TZ="met dst;[gt    ]&This is an example of  an InfoPrism document;
The authors of the document should appear in AUTHOR elements. At least one element is required. The optional EMAIL attribute specifies the email address of the author.

The STAMP element contains information about the time of the last modification of the document. This element and the HOUR, MINUTE, SECS and TZ attributes are optional.

The TOC element directs the translator to include a table of contents in the generated document. The table of contents is labeled with a default given by each translator. You may override this with a TITLE element inside of the TOC element:

[lt    ]&-- appropriate for german documents -->;[lt    ]&OC;[lt    ]&ITLE>Inhaltsverzeichni;[lt    ]&TITLE;[lt    ]&TOC;

Additional elements are:

MAJORHEADING
Directs the (HTML) translator to use the text inside this element as major heading instead of the text inside the TITLE element.

The Main Part Of the Document

The main part of a typical document consists of a number of sections, which may be nested. The normal approach for text processing systems is to define different commands for different levels. E.g., LaTeX knows of the sectional units part, chapter, section, subsection, subsubsection, paragraph and subparagraph.

For sake of flexibility, InfoPrism knows only of one sectioning element: SECTION. This allows you to:

Any section may have up to three title elements:

TITLE contains the section title, DESCR a section description and SHORT a short section title.

Within sections, text can be arranged in a set of paragraphs by using the P element. However, the P element should not be placed immediately before or after the PRE/EXAMPLE element.

Elements of a InfoPrism document

Lists

Three types of lists are supported by InfoPrism: unordered, ordered and definition lists. List of the same or different types can be nested.

The UL element defines an unordered, the OL defines an ordered list of items. Each item in an UL or an OL list is contained within an LI element.

The DL element defines an glossary list. This list type, also known as a definition list, presents a list of items, each with a descriptive paragraph. Therefore a DL list can contain two elements:

DT
term being defined
DD
definition of the term
These elements must appear in pairs.

Quotations and Examples

Quotations and examples are blocks of text consisting of one or more whole paragraphs that are treated differently from the bulk of the text.

The EXAMPLE Element

The EXAMPLE element marks text as an example that is not part of the running text, such as computer input or output. This element preserves the line breaks and space characters in the original text. The PRE element is a synonym for the EXAMPLE element.

Cross-References

Within a Document

Internal references between elements within a document can be carried out by using the LABEL and REF elements. The LABEL element is the place to that the cross-reference points to. The mandatory attribute NAME has an unique identifier for that label as value. To reference this label, insert a REF element. The mandatory attribute NAME has the identifier as value and the attribute TEXT may be highlighted in the formatted document.

Across Documents

Hyperlinks to documents contained within the same (file)system are indicated by the LINK element. The mandatory attribute DOC specifies the document name, usually the file name without the format specific extension.

Several resources located locally or anywhere in the world can be identified by URLs. The URL element and the HTMLURL represent links to those resources. The URL is specified by the URL attribute. The NAME attribute holds the "name" of the resource.

Marking Words and Phrases

Parts of a document can be highlighted by choosing a visual apperance different from the one used for the main text of the document.

InfoPrism allows you to specify a special formatting style for phrases. This is useful to put an on one or more words in your document and may result in sort of in the formatted document.

The phrase highlighting elements are similar to HTML and can be divided into logical and physical highlighting elements. The advantage of logical elements that the physical appearance of the formatted text is not fixed by the document. Only in the cases where a certain font is absolutely required, physical elements should be used.

Logical highlighting elements

ElementPurposeDefault fontExample
CITEcitationitalicsVeni, vidi, vici!
CODEexample of typed codefixed-width fontexit 0;
DFNdefinitionbold or bold italicsdefine
EM, EMPHemphasisitalicsimportant
KBDkeyboard inputcat /etc/passwd
SAMPliteral charactersas is
S, STRONGstronger emphasisitalicsstrong
VARvariable nameerrno

Use the CODE element to indicate text that is a piece of a program and which consists of entire syntactic tokens. It is appropriate for

The KBD element marks a block of text as keyboard input.

The VAR element marks a block of text as a metasyntactic variable. A metasyntactic variable is something stands for another piece fo text. For example, you should use a metasyntactic variable in the documentation of a function to describe the arguments that are passed to that function. Do not use the VAR element for the names of particular variables in programming languages.

The SAMP element marks a block of text as literal example or a sequence of characters in a file, string, pattern, etc. Any time you are referring to single characters, you should use the SAMP element unless the KBD element is more appropriate. Basically, this element is a catchall for whatever is not covered by the CODE and KBD elements.

The DFN element marks a block of text as the definition of a term. Use this element only in passages whose purpose is to introduce a term which will be used again or which the reader ought to know.

Short Citations
The CITE element indicates that the text enclosed is cited from some reference.

Tables

Data is often most efficiently presented in tabular data. Tables are most conveniently constructed by the TABLE element and its companions CAPTION, TR, TH and TD. A table is an array of cells, which can be either header or data cells. Header cells usually describe the contents of a row or a column. Each row of the table is represented by the TR element. The CAPTION element is used to provide a caption for the table. Tables cannot be nested.

The following table describes keywords for declared values in attribute lists:

Declared values used in InfoPrism's DTD
KeywordDescriptionExample
CDATAcharacter data[lt ]&RL URL="http://sunsite.unc.edu/mdw/linux.html" NAME="LDP";
IDunique ID value[lt ]&AKEINDEX NAME=cp;
IDREFvalue referencing element with corresponding ID value[lt ]&RINTINDEX NAME=cp;
IDREFSlist with values referencing elements with corresponding ID values[lt ]&NDEX NAME="cp fn";
NOTATIONname that identifies the notation of the element's content[lt ]&ATH mu=latex;
NUMBERnumber[lt ]&IBYEAR no=1996;
NUTOKENSlist of number tokens separated by spaces [lt ]&IBCITE key=sgmlimp pages="241 242 243";

Special Characters

SGML accepts only a subset of the ASCII character set as input. Other characters can be introduced with entities:
EntityOutputDescription
[amp ]´[aacute]small a, acute accent
[amp ]´[Aacute]capital A, acute accent
[amp ]¨[auml ]small a, dieresis or umlaut mark
[amp ]¨[Auml ]capital A, dieresis or umlaut mark
[amp ]¨[ouml ]small o, dieresis or umlaut mark
[amp ]¨[Ouml ]capital O, dieresis or umlaut mark
[amp ]&zlig;[szlig ]small sharp s, German (sz ligature)
[amp ]¨[uuml ]small u, dieresis or umlaut mark
[amp ]¨[Uuml ]capital U, dieresis or umlaut mark

Index Generation

To find a topic of interest in a large document, you usually turn to the table of contents or, more often, to the index. Therefore, an index is a very important part of a document, and most users' entry point to source of information is precisely through a pointer in the index. In respect to this, you should plan and index and develop it along with the main text. In an index, the entries are listed in alphabetical order, together with some kind of a link to the discussion of each entry. E.g., in an Info file the link is a menu entry leading to the first node referenced.

Every index must be defined in the preamble with the MAKEINDEX element.

Each INDEX element generates an index entry for the indices selected by the value of the NAME attribute. The contents of the INDEX element are normally not inserted in the running text. This behaviour can be reversed by embedding the text in an EXPOSE or an EP element. The closing tag of these elements may be omitted.

Contents of INDEX elementCorresponding text
append
[lt ]&XPOSE>appen;[lt ]&EXPOSE> comman; append
section <EP>countercounter

Another way to create an index entry is by specifying a value for the INDEX attribute of the LABEL element.

To generate an index, you must include an INSERTINDEX element at the place where the index is to appear. Usually, the indices are located at the end of the document.

Bibliography Generation

Entry Types

BIBARTICLE
An article from a journal or magazine.
Required: BIBAUTHOR, BIBTITLE, BIBJOURNAL , BIBYEAR
Optional: BIBVOLUME, BIBNUMBER, BIBPAGES , BIBMONTH, BIBNOTE
BIBBOOK
A book with an explicit publisher.

Required: BIBAUTHOR or BIBEDITOR, BIBTITLE , BIBPUBLISHER, BIBYEAR
Optional: BIBVOLUME or BIBNUMBER, BIBSERIES, BIBADDRESS, BIBEDITION, BIBMONTH, BIBNOTE
BIBNPARTICLE
An article from a newspaper.
Required: BIBAUTHOR or BIBINITIALS, BIBTITLE, BIBJOURNAL, BIBYEAR
Optional: BIBNUMBER, BIBPAGES, BIBMONTH , BIBNOTE
BIBNEWSARTICLE
A posting in Usenet newsgroup(s).
Required: BIBAUTHOR, BIBTITLE, BIBNEWSGROUPS, BIBDATE, BIBMSGID

Data Fields

Data field elements can be positioned arbritrary within the document type elements with the following exceptions:

Now a comprehensive list of all data field elements:

BIBADDRESS
address of the publisher. The complete address is needed only for small publishers.
BIBAUTHOR
name of an author
BIBEDITION
edition of a book, e.g., "Third."
BIBEDITOR
name of an editor
BIBINITIALS
initials of the author.
BIBJOURNAL
journal name
BIBMONTH
month of publication (value of the ABBR attribute: "jan", "feb", ...)
BIBNOTE
any additional information
BIBNUMBER
the number of a work in a series (value of the NO attribute)
BIBPAGES
one or more page numbers or range of numbers
BIBPUBLISHER in the RANGE attribute.
name of the publisher
BIBSERIES
the name of a series or set of books. When citing an entire book, the BIBTITLE element gives its title and an optional BIBSERIES element gives the name of a series or multivolume set in which the book is published.
BIBTITLE
title of the document
BIBVOLUME
the volume of journal or multivolume book (value of the NO attribute)
BIBYEAR
year of publication (value of the NO attribute)

Hints

Frequently used words and phrases can be replaced by general entities :
  1. Declare the general entity in the document type declaration subset.
  2. Enclose the entity name in between the entity reference characters ( [amp ] and ;)
The subject of this document is the document processing system InfoPrism, so that this name appears at many places in this document. Therefore I have declared the general entity ip as follows:

]>
Now, any reference to InfoPrism in the text can be replaced with [amp ]&p; .

Note that the first declaration of an entity overrides subsequent declarations.

Element and Attribute Index

Entity Index

Concept Index


Written by Stefan Hornburg <racke@gundel.han.de>
Translated from manual.sgml by Info Prism's sgml2html v0.0.6
Last modified 4. November 1998