[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] DocBook 5.0 super-quick HOWTO

[Dan Scott]

I've been playing a little bit with DocBook 5 XML and using XInclude
to compose a document from multiple files, and committed changes to
the sample documents at
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/browser/trunk/docs/ to demonstrate
that experiment.

To try it out yourself:

1. Download the "docbook-xsl-ns" stylesheets from
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935#files
2. Download the sample files from
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/browser/trunk/docs/
3. Use the xsltproc utility (part of the xsltproc package on Debian
and Ubuntu) to process the document using your preferred stylesheet;
in my case, the stylesheets have been unzipped into
/home/dan/docbook-xsl-ns-1.74.0 directory. You have to pass the
--xinclude parameter to force xsltproc to include XInclude'd files; on
my system, the command to process the whole sample manual is as
follows:

xsltproc --xinclude /home/dan/docbook-xsl-ns-1.74.0/xhtml/onechunk.xsl index.xml

(This automatically generates a single HTML file named "index.html").

If you are using Windows, installing an XSLT processor is
unfortunately not a simple process. The Cygwin utilities
(http://www.cygwin.com) offer a freely downloadable compiled version
of xsltproc, but the install and use process is a bit painful. There
are also various Java-based tools that are available, but that seem to
require annoying amounts of environment variables to be set to get
things working properly.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University