Terms and Conditions:

Bob Stayton wrote:All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

From the Preface:

DocBook is a collection of standards and tools for technical publishing. DocBook was originally created by a consortium of software companies as a standard for computer documentation. But the basic “book” features of DocBook can be used for other kinds of content, so it has been adapted to many purposes.

A major advantage of DocBook is the availability of DocBook tools from many sources, not just from a single vendor of a proprietary file format. You can mix and match components for editing, typesetting, version control, and HTML conversion. You can assemble a custom system that is well suited to your needs, and many of the components are available for free.

The other major advantage of DocBook is the set of free stylesheets that are available for it. Written by Norman Walsh in the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), these stylesheets enable anyone to publish their DocBook content in print and HTML. The stylesheets are now developed and maintained as an open-source project on SourceForge. An active community of users and contributors keeps up the development of the stylesheets and answers questions.

Intended Audience:

This book is for people who want publish DocBook XML files using the DocBook XSL stylesheets. It is a "how to" guide that gets you up and running quickly, and then provides the details you need to gain access to the full power of DocBook. The book covers:

- Obtaining and setting up XSL tools and the DocBook XSL stylesheets.

- Using the built-in options to control the XSL stylesheets.

- Customizing the XSL stylesheets to match your design needs.

(This book does not cover the SGML version of DocBook, nor the DocBook DSSSL stylesheets.)

You don't need to be an XML expert to use DocBook XSL. You will need to know about XML elements and attributes, since you will be working with DocBook XML files. And you will need to know how to execute commands by typing them on a command line rather than through a point-and-click interface. If you know nothing about XSL, you can still use the stylesheets to generate high-quality output. You can also customize to a degree using the built-in stylesheet parameters. Learning some XSL will enable you to more fully customize the output. This book can teach you basic XSL, and provides dozens of examples that you can use and learn from.

This book won't show you how to write DocBook documents. The best reference for writing in DocBook is DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh.