OASIS Open

This is $Revision: 1.1 $ from $Date: 2001/06/26 13:25:03 $.

DocBook is an SGML DTD An XML version is also available.

DocBook is maintained by the DocBook Technical Committee of OASIS.

There are many sources of information about these general topics. Robin Cover's SGML/XML Web Page is a great place to start.

DocBook is available from OASIS at http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/.

DocBook version 4.1 is the current version. The current XML version is 4.1.2.

The Modular DocBook Stylesheets are a popular way to format DocBook documents for print presentation (using TeX, RTF, or FrameMaker) or online presentation (using HTML).

They are DSSSL stylesheets. The acronym stands for Document Style Semantics and Specification Language. It is defined by ISO/IEC 10179:1996. For more general information about DSSSL, see the DSSSL Page.

The most common DSSSL engine is Jade, by James Clark. Jade is available for Unix and Windows platforms.

From http://nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl/. They are maintained by Norman Walsh.

See http://nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl/ for the latest version information.

DSSSL allows one stylesheet to "use" another. The stylesheet inherits all of the properties of the stylesheet that it is using, but local definitions take precedence over imported ones.

The simplest custom stylesheet looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE style-sheet PUBLIC "-//James Clark//DTD DSSSL Style Sheet//EN" [
<!ENTITY docbook.dsl 
         PUBLIC "-//Norman Walsh//DOCUMENT DocBook Print Stylesheet//EN"
         CDATA DSSSL>
]>

<style-sheet>
<style-specification use="docbook">
<style-specification-body>

;; your (re)definitions go here

</style-specification-body>
</style-specification>

<external-specification id="docbook" document="docbook.dsl">

</style-sheet>

This stylesheet customizes the print stylesheet. If you want to customize the HTML stylesheet, use the HTML stylesheet public identifier in the declaration of the docbook.dsl entity.

As of January, 1999: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norsk Bokm�l, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

In version 1.33 of the stylesheets, I changed the language codes to be ISO/RFC compliant. Old lang attribute values will continue to work, but the filenames have changed.

Primarily, it means that generated text (the words "Chapter" or "Table of Contents") will appear in the desired language. Language support also changes some punctuation in some languages.

Please create a localization for the language and contribute it! Supporting another language is not very difficult.

There are two ways: set the lang attribute to the language code of the desired language, or create a stylesheet that defines the default language.

For example, to make a Russian book, start your document with <book lang="ru">.

Alternatively, put

(define %default-language% "fr")

in your custom stylesheet.