[drupal-docs] book module improvements

[puregin]

    See also the discussion in the import/export XML feature 'issue'
for book module. (http://drupal.org/node/1482)

    Basically, this idea has already been implemented in my
patch  http://drupal.org/node/1898.   Note that headers alone
are not enough to represent or derive the sectional structure.

    I can already do HTML exports using my patch.  True XML
exports would be a relatively easy extension. - I'll submit some
more code for this.  Import requires a little more thought -
as Boris points out, there are choices which have to be
made.

    At the moment there's quite a few issues/patches/discussions
around this - obviously it's a highly desirable feature.

    Let's work through the existing issues/discussions rather
than starting duplicate threads.

     Djun


On 18 May 2005, at 8:42 AM, Charlie Lowe wrote:

> Here's an idea. In a conversation on drupaled.org, Boris mentions
> import/export again (http://www.drupaled.org/node/39#comment-67). I'll
> quote my response which contains what might be an easy way to do it:
>
> "As a first step toward this, I've been wondering why we couldn't use
> the printer-friendly version to do this. It's already exporting a book
> as HTML with the different nodes tagged with the heading id's. Suppose
> that the id tag was kept with the nid of that node, but that the class
> was set to the nid of the parent. Then we would just need to have 
> Drupal
> process a printer-friendly version and pull it back in as either
>
> 1) a new book
> 2) tell Drupal the parent in which to place it
> 3) tell Drupal to match it up with an existing book, creating new pages
> wherever the user has specified new nid's in the markup that don't 
> exist
> within the existing book."
>
> I personally kind of like this because it's a way of extending a 
> current
> output feature rather than creating a new one. Should be pretty easy to
> tell users how to do just the basic importing and exporting and the
> export is in a very readable format.
>
> I'll add this to our list of ideas.
>
> Charlie
>
> Kieran Lal wrote:
>> As someone who is spending a reasonable amount of time documenting I 
>> can
>> tell you that writing in the book isn't a lot of fun.  Especially, if
>> it's fixed width.  I'd like to be able to export in the morning, get 
>> on
>> the caltrain without a connection, and check it in when I get to work.
>>  Now that would be productive.
>>
>> Feel free to export it any acronym you want, as long as I can edit it 
>> in
>> a text editor and not a browser I'll be happy.  Bonus point's if I can
>> spell check it.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Kieran
>>