Chapter 2. Infrastructure

Table of Contents
Necessary And Helpful Packages
The Environment

This section describes which basic system prerequisites have to be fulfilled for the work with DocBook-XML.

It must be said here that there are many ways to produce an arbitrarily formatted document from the DocBook-XML-version of a document. Regarding the audience of this primer document only "simple" methods are mentioned that imply a fairly high level of automatism.

Necessary And Helpful Packages

To assure the availability of the tools that are required for creating and processing DocBook-XML documents the following packages should be installed. Although not all of these packages have to be installed if only a specific task has to be accomplished (e.g. only DocBook version 3 or version 4) it won't hurt to have them all. The working environment is then prepared for most events.

To create a specific output format from a DocBook-XML document there are basically two ways.

  1. Using XSL-stylesheets and an XSLT processor in conjunction with an FOP processor.

    The XSLT processor usually produces HTML or FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) output. The FOP output is then fed into an FOP processor that is a print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (output independent formatter). E.g. the apache-FOP is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and then renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported are PDF, PCL, PS, SVG, XML (area tree representation), Print, AWT, MIF and TXT. The primary output target is PDF (HTML is missing).

    Note: All this is currently work in progress (V.0.20) and therefore has not yet settled. Furthermore the establishment of the infrastructure requires some knowledge of the matter and can't be done purely from the SuSE-Linux-Distribution (internet download required).

  2. Using DSSSL-stylesheets and jade

    This approach is more straight forward because the necessary tools can be found ready made on the SuSE-Linux-Distribution. The tools are fairly easy to use because there are comfortable frontends available. The major drawback of this method is the fact that jade uses TeX (not LaTeX) as interim format on its way to the destination format. This implies some loss of structural information which in turn restricts the layout capabilities. Therefore full size print documentation (e.g. printed books) can't be done this way. Nevertheless for the kind of internal documentation that has to be produced by the development department this is the method of choice. It's beautiful enough and it provides way for the key formats HTML, PS, DVI and PDF.

    Note: It must be said here that there are many packages available for this way and that it is a matter of research to find out what all of them are doing and how they interact.

Assuming that the latter of both methods mentioned above (using jade) should be used for documentation work the following packages are of interest. Those that are absolutely necessary are marked accordingly.