convert unnumbered sections to docbook's <simplesect>

[miekg]

Right now an unnumbered section: # section {-}

is just converted to a <sectX>. I think it makes sense to convert it to a <simplesect> or maybe a <section> to distinguish it from normal section in the docbook output.

[mpickering]

Can you please post a source file indicating exactly what you mean by an unumbered section and the command you are using to convert to DocBook.

[miekg]

% pandoc -t docbook <(echo '# A Section {-}')
<sect1 id="a-section">
  <title>A Section</title>
  <para>
  </para>
</sect1>

And then my proposal is to make this an <simplesect/section>, although no good docbook equivalent exists.

[jgm]

simplesect is for sections with no subsections. But pandoc unnumbered sections can have subsections. So that's not a good solution. section could be used, I suppose, but I'm not sure about how section and sectN would interact.

[jgm]

Would it be sufficient if the section tag had an attribute that indicated it was not to be numbered? Is there an appropriate docbook attribute, allowed on sectN tags, that would have this meaning?

[miekg]

Looking through the DocBook spec, there is nothing obvious, however the following seems legal:

<sect1>
    <info role="text"/>
    ....
 </sect1>

Where I propose to make "text" -> "unnumered"

refs:

http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/sect1.html
http://docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ref-elements.html#common.attributes

[miekg]

I can work around this by abusing anchor names, like

# section {#nonumber0}

And check for that in the DocBook output.

[lifeunleaded]

I would say that is best solved by adding role="unnumbered" to the section. Section labelling (i.e. numbering) is controlled by the XSLT stylesheets in DocBook, so not numbering an individual section (rather than stop at a certain depth) would be implemented in a stylesheet customization. But marking the relevant sections would at least allow a custom stylesheet to match precisely.

[lifeunleaded]

I made a commit that failed tests; this was because I didn't think a push to my fork would trigger the CI. I've identified the tests failing locally and have a fix coming.