Ubuntu master document improvements

[DAVID ALLEN]

-For Matthew Paul Thomas. My copy of the 'Official
Ubuntu Book' (Nov 2006) doesn't have anything about
master document. The OpenOffice.org Writer Guide ch.
13 (Dec 30 2006) - this is what I mean by the master
document system - has a worked example of the basics,
but nothing of the philosophy or principles to help
one get further.  The Getting Started Guide has ch. 12
on Templates and ch. 13 on Styles: they do not include
everything I need to know to get my philosophy notes
together, indexed, and decently printed. (Can I have
subdocs of subdocs as in Word Perfect? How do I find
out which template this master document uses? . . . ).


Thank you for the reference to the Page Structure
piece. I shall have that by me as I go. 

A 'complete spec. for Ubuntu' is not what I have in
mind. The problem I'm   concerned with is that to do a
complex master document of the sort I evisage for my
own benefit, the help and examples are not enough, and
I am hitting discrepancies all over the place. If, in
sorting my way round and through these, I can produce
some notes that would be useful to manual writers and
code developers, with a view to getting things
improved, then I would want to publish it to them in a
useful way. All I have in mind is that which is in
ch.13 of the Writer Guide, but with a..l..l the
details. I'm not interested in documenting other
things. Yes, I'm totally selfish. The reason I use
Ubuntu is to do major document maintenance in a big
way. I'm not 'interested in writing design
specifications' as such. (For years at IBM I had to do
this with the PL/I language specifications amongst
other things; I retired from there some 20 years ago.)
I'm interested in getting a GOOD, well described, 
master     document facility for me (and thus others)
to use, and this seems a feasible way. 

For Phil Bull, I hope you'll be able to see what I
mean soon, at least in a small way. The couple of
examples in parentheses above are a start. The next
point, I suspect, is how does one handle sub-docs with
their templates and a master doc. with its own,
different, one: the problem will not be solved by a
'next you do this, then this' approach. I shall want
to know how control which templates go where, and
which are there already, and how to find out where
they are. At present this seems difficult. 

Thanks for the interest: I look forward to more.