The XSLT C library for Gnome

DocBookis anXML/SGML vocabulary particularly well suited to books and papers aboutcomputer hardware and software.

xsltproc and libxslt are not specifically dependant on DocBook, but sincea lot of people use xsltproc and libxml2 for DocBook formatting, here are afew pointers and informations which may be helpful:

• The DocBookhomepage at Oasisyou should find pointers there on all the lastestversions of the DTDs and XSLT stylesheets
• DocBook: The Definitive Guideisthe official reference documentation for DocBook.
• DocBookOpen Repositorycontains a lot of informations about DocBook
• Bob Stayton provides a lot ofresourcesand consulting services around DocBook.
• Here is a shell scriptto generateXML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 . If it can write to the /etc/xml/directory, it will set-up /etc/xml/catalog and /etc/xml/docbook based onthe resources found on the system. Otherwise it will just create~/xmlcatalog and ~/dbkxmlcatalog and doing:

  export XMLCATALOG=$HOME/xmlcatalog

  should allow to process DocBook documentations without requiringnetwork accesses for the DTd or stylesheets

• I have uploaded asmall tarballcontaining XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seemsto work fine for me too
• Informations on installing a WindowsDocBook processing setupbased on Cygwin (using the binaries from theofficial Windows port should be possible too)
• Alexander Kirillov's page on Using DocBook XML4.1.2(RPM packages)
• Tim Waugh's xmlto front-endconversion script
• Linux Documentation Project DocBook-Install-mini-HOWTO
• ScrollKeeper the open documentation cataloging project has a DocBooksection
• Dan York presentation on Publishingusing DocBook XML

Do not use the --docbook option of xsltproc to process XML DocBookdocuments, this option is only intended to provide some (limited) support ofthe SGML version of DocBook.

Points which are not DocBook specific but still worth mentionningagain:

• if you think DocBook processing time is too slow, make sure you haveXML Catalogs pointing to a local installation of the DTD of DocBook.Check the XML Catalog pageto understand more on this subject.
• before processing a new document, use the command

  xmllint --valid --noout path_to_document

  to make sure that your input is valid DocBook. And fixes the errorsbefore processing further. Note that XSLT processing may work correctlywith some forms of validity errors left, but in general it can givetroubles on output.

Daniel Veillard