| Tools and Tips for Writing DocBook Documentation | ||
|---|---|---|
 | Part XVI. DocBook |  |
| Tools and Tips for Writing DocBook Documentation | ||
|---|---|---|
| | Part XVI. DocBook | |
June 2007
DocBook can be edited using various editors We use the nXML mode package (also here) to author DocBook under Emacs. See also my DocBook-under-Debian-HOWTO for a more in-depth explanation. A few handy shortcuts in nXML-mode:
c-enter: tab-completion
c-c c-n: goto next error
c-c c-s c-t: choose schema when starting a new file
c-c c-f: match last tag we are in with end-tag
ESC TAB: finish current tag (or show possible options)
A good reference is DocBook: The Definitive Guide. A list of templates would be handy. DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide is another excellent piece of documentation, as are the docs that come with the “docbook-xsl-doc” package under Debian.
Conversion to XHTML is done with
xsltproc \
--stringparam base.dir $(@D)/ \
--stringparam use.id.as.filename 1 \
--stringparam root.filename '' \
--stringparam chunker.output.encoding UTF-8 \
/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/onechunk.xsl \
file.xml
in which case the id of the top level tag is the basename of the file that is generated [56]
As of september 2008, things have changed a bit: docbook.org has brought out docbook V5.0 with the new Definitive Guide.