DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Name

refpurpose — A short (one-sentence) synopsis of the topic of a reference page

Synopsis

refpurpose ::= (text | Bibliography inlines | Error inlines | Graphic inlines | GUI inlines | Indexing inlines | Keyboard inlines | Linking inlines | Markup inlines | Math inlines | Object-oriented programming inlines | Operating system inlines | Product inlines | Programming inlines | Publishing inlines | Technical inlines | Ubiquitous inlines)*

Attribute synopsis

Common attributes and common linking attributes.

Description

The refpurpose is a concise summary of the topic of the reference page. A refpurpose is usually limited to a single, short sentence.

Processing expectations

Formatted inline. See refnamediv.

In a large reference, refnames and refpurposes are sometimes used to construct a permuted index. A permuted index is a keyword-in-context concordance of lines, like the short definitions in this element reference; the keyword cycles alphabetically through the words of the (definition) lines.

Formatting reference pages may require a fairly sophisticated processing system. Much of the meta-information about a reference page (its name, type, purpose, title, and classification) is stored in wrappers near the beginning of the refentry.

Common presentational features, such as titles and running headers, may require data from several of these wrappers plus some generated text. Other formatting often requires that these elements be reordered.

Examples

See reference and refentry for examples that use this ...