Unit Test: xref.004.xml

Most kinds of generated text apply across an entire document: do you want chapters to be numbered? Should generated text be in English or French? What form should numbered and unnumbered sections have? The mechanisms for changing this generated control the formatting of cross references.

But it’s sometimes desirable to be able to change the format of a cross reference on an individual basis (that is, on the basis of the context in which the reference occurs, not the nature of what is referenced). You might, for example, want to shorten a cross reference to just a label if it’s already been referenced several times.

Consider a cross reference to a section: see <xref linkend="syntax-highlighting"/>. In the localization style of this guide, that is rendered like this: see Section 2, “Syntax highlighting”.

The text that is generated by a cross reference can be customized for individual references with the xrefstyle attribute. For example, see <xref linkend="syntax-highlighting" xrefstyle="%l"/>, will produce a result like this: see 2.

You can use the %c, %l and %p values in xrefstyle. There is also an additional %label for the full Label, which is the component`s name and number. The use of these percent-values is explained in the following table, where all cross references target the next section called Syntax highlighting.

Legacy values for xrefstyle

In order to support migration from XSLT 1.0 Stylesheets, xslTNG supports the template: Syntax which is explained in “Customizing with an xrefstyle attribute / Using template:” in the book “DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide”. This is summarized in the following table.

Program listings and other verbatim environments can be “syntax highlighted”, that is, the significant tokens in the listing can be colored differently (keywords in red, quoted strings in blue, that sort of thing).