[olug] DocBook

[Dave Burchell]

William E. Kempf says:
> 
> 
> Dave Burchell said:
> > William E. Kempf says:
> >>
> >> Anyone familiar with DocBook-Utils, specifically db2html?  New to this
> >> stuff, but supposedly after installing all the prerequisite packages I
> >> should be able to do this:
> >>
> >> $ db2html myfile.sgml
> >>
> >> However, this produces the following:
> >>
> >> output is myfile
> >> jw: Please specify at least one catalog
> >>
> >> I'm not at all sure how to specify a catalog, or what catalog to
> >> specify.
> >
> > I keep my Web site as a DocBook file, but I don't use db2html.  I wrote
> > my own (XSL) stylesheet to generate HTML; I'll send it to you if you
> > like.
> 
> I'd be interested, but this is for a large Open Source project and we'd
> need to stick to the standard tools unless there were a compelling reason
> not to.
> 
> -- 
> William E. Kempf

I use an XSLT stylesheet that I process with Xalan.  However, you could
use any XSLT processor that conforms to the standard (see
"http://www.w3.org/Style/XSL/").  Saxon, for example, is another
leading XSLT processor.

I did have to do one hackish thing: XSLT 1.0 only allows for output of
one file.  I wrote a simple Perl script to chop the one big file my
stylesheet produces into the appropriate number of HTML files.

I consider my approach pretty well standards-based, since it only
requires an XSLT processor that follows the XSLT standard, and the Perl
script could be replaced with your favorite programming tool (like ANSI
C) if you wish.  However, I don't know if you would consider Xalan one
of the "standard tools" or not.

Another thing to look out for: What version of DocBook are you using?
The XML version?  XSLT requires XML input, not SGML.  db2html, OTOH,
requires SGML.

-- 
Dave Burchell                                          40.49'N, 96.41'W
Free your mind and your software will follow.              402-467-1619
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/burchell/                  burchell at acm.org