The XSLT C library for Gnome

DocBook is an XML/SGML vocabulary particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software.

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

• The DocBook homepage at Oasis you should find pointers there on all the lastest versions of the DTDs and XSLT stylesheets
• DocBook: The Definitive Guide is the official reference documentation for DocBook.
• Here is a shell script to generate XML 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 on the 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 requiring network accesses for the DTd or stylesheets

• I have uploaded a small tarball containing XML Catalogs for DocBook 4.1.2 which seems to work fine for me too
• Informations on installing a Windows DocBook processing setup based on Cygwin (using the binaries from the official Windows port should be possible too)
• Alexander Kirillov's page on Using DocBook XML 4.1.2 (RPM packages)
• Tim Waugh's xmlto front-end conversion script
• Linux Documentation Project DocBook-Install-mini-HOWTO
• ScrollKeeper the open documentation cataloging project has a DocBook section
• Dan York presentation on Publishing using DocBook XML

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

Points which are not DocBook specific but still worth mentionning again:

• if you think DocBook processing time is too slow, make sure you have XML Catalogs pointing to a local installation of the DTD of DocBook. Check the XML Catalog page to 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 errors before processing further. Note that XSLT processing may work correctly with some forms of validity errors left, but in general it can give troubles on output.

Daniel Veillard