Customization of the 4.3 DocBook XSL Stylesheets for the TCC

DocBook is a generalized framework for writing documentation using XML. Here at the New Mexico Tech Computer Center (TCC), we use DocBook extensively for external and internal documentation. Among the many advantages of this system is that a single source document can be translated mechanically to both HTML and PDF representations.

This document contains all the files used for local customization, in “lightweight literate programming” format. For more information, see the author's Lightweight literate programming page.

The local DocBook toolchain consists of these components:

Norman Walsh's DocBook XSL Stylesheets provide a generic styling of DocBook that can be customized with local style conventions. These stylesheets consist of XSLT scripts. For more information about XSLT, see XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0.
These style sheets can be downloaded from the SourceForge repository.
The xsltproc package implements the XSLT language. Production of the HTML output from a DocBook document needs only XSLT.
The xep processor is necessary to produce the printable, PDF (Adobe Page Description Format) form of a DocBook document. This transformation starts by using xsltproc to transform the original DocBook document into XSL, also known as XSL-FO (for Formatting Objects). The resulting .fo file is input to xep, which produces the PDF output file.
For more information on XSL, see the standard: Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Version 1.0.

1.1. Bob Stayton's DocBook XSL: The complete guide

Without customization, the stock DocBook XSL Stylesheets produce a pretty bland, generic output style. This document describes the TCC's local customization layers, built on top of the DocBook XSL Stylesheets, that give our documents their local style.

Documentation for the DocBook XSL Stylesheets is rather skeletal. Fortunately, there is an excellent book that describes the customization process in detail:

Stayton, Bob. DocBook XSL: The complete guide. Third edition, March 2005, ISBN 0-9741521-2-9.

This book will be referred to throughout this document as “Stayton.”