$Id: utility.xsl 7101 2007-07-20 15:32:12Z xmldoc $ This is technical reference documentation for the miscellaneous utility templates in the DocBook XSL Stylesheets. These templates are defined in a separate file from the set of “common” templates because some of the common templates reference DocBook XSL stylesheet parameters, requiring the entire set of parameters to be imported/included in any stylesheet that imports/includes the common templates. The utility templates don’t import or include any DocBook XSL stylesheet parameters, so the utility templates can be used without importing the whole set of parameters. This is not intended to be user documentation. It is provided for developers writing customization layers for the stylesheets. Logs/emits formatted notes and warnings The log.message template is a utility template for logging/emitting formatted messages – that is, notes and warnings, along with a given log “level” and an identifier for the “source” that the message relates to. level Text to log/emit in the message-level field to indicate the message level (Note or Warning) source Text to log/emit in the source field to identify the “source” to which the notification/warning relates. This can be any arbitrary string, but because the message lacks line and column numbers to identify the exact part of the source document to which it relates, the intention is that the value you pass into the source parameter should give the user some way to identify the portion of their source document on which to take potentially take action in response to the log message (for example, to edit, change, or add content). So the source value should be, for example, an ID, book/chapter/article title, title of some formal object, or even a string giving an XPath expression. context-desc Text to log/emit in the context-description field to describe the context for the message. context-desc-field-length Specifies length of the context-description field (in characters); default is 12 If the text specified by the context-desc parameter is longer than the number of characters specified in context-desc-field-length, it is truncated to context-desc-field-length (12 characters by default). If the specified text is shorter than context-desc-field-length, it is right-padded out to context-desc-field-length (12 by default). If no value has been specified for the context-desc parameter, the field is left empty and the text of the log message begins with the value of the message parameter. message Text to log/emit in the actual message field message-field-length Specifies length of the message field (in characters); default is 45 Outputs a message (generally, to standard error). 12 right right : : Gets a title from the current document The get.doc.title template is a utility template for returning the first title found in the current document. Returns a string containing some identifying title for the current document . Right-pads or left-pads a string out to a certain length This function takes string padVar and pads it out in the direction rightLeft to the string-length length, using string padChar (a space character by default) as the padding string (note that padChar can be a string; it is not limited to just being a single character). This function began as a copy of Nate Austin's prepend-pad function in the Padding Content section of Dave Pawson's XSLT FAQ. Returns a (padded) string. left