Existing Mechanism or 1.3 Proposal for "Navigation Only" Topicrefs?

We have this issue in the 1.2 spec itself, and I just ran into in building
support for our own product documentation: how to indicate clearly in a map
that a given topicref (and its descendants) should generate only navigation
and not define content of the main presentation flow.

I have the feeling we've discussed this in the TC before. I reviewed the 1.3
proposal list and didn't see anything about this. Have I overlooked an
existing feature or is this requirement not yet addressed in a proposal?

This is an issue only for monolothic output such as PDF, where each
unqualified reference to a topic contributes that topic, in that location,
to the result output. That means you can't have alternative navigation
structures in such a map without getting duplicate topics.

What comes to mind immediately is the value "navigation-only" for
processing-role, but I am *not* proposing a new value for 1.2.

In PDF (and FO 1.1 in general) you can define any set of navigation
structures you want, so there's no implementation difficulty in translating
such navigation-only topicrefs to PDF or FO-driven outputs.

If this isn't yet accounted for I will add it to the 1.3 proposal list.

Thanks,

Eliot

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Eliot Kimber | Senior Solutions Architect | Really Strategies, Inc.
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