DocBook and Good Output
Friday, January 29th, 2010 | General
It’s really taken quite some time for me to get a grip on the entire concept of DocBook and, specifically, how it goes from DocBook to a pretty PDF file. Every time I’ve started fiddling around with it, it’s cost me several hours just trying to remember how it all works and fits together.
Today I am happy to say that it all finally clicked into place for me. And, in hindsight, I went about understanding and learning DocBook using an incorrect approach – basically back-to-front. I tried to understand DocBook, then the transformation layer and then get to XSL FO. No.. bad idea. If you’re trying to learn DocBook and get a good understanding of how everything works, you need to learn in order:
- XML Namespaces – Just kinda know what they are about and how to import them and use them.
- XSL FO – Learn about blocks, general attributes and properties, documents and flows.
- XSLT – Figure out how XSLT works, the templates, callbacks, “variables”, etc. Understand that it’s not a procedural language and not a see-this-replace-with-that kind of engine. Understand that you’ll actually building a DOM.
- DocBook – Get acquainted with the allows tags, the hierarchy and what they’re used for in the document.
- DocBook XSL – The stylesheets you can get which perform XSLT transformations from DocBook schema into FO schema, for example.
Still, it’ll take some time if you’re coming in as a newbie. Speaking as a programmer, I found it really different.
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