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DocBook is a standard for creating well-formated plain text documents. It allows the creation of documentation that is portable between different operating systems and text processing tools. DocBook documents can easily be transformed into other output formats. DocBook is plain text and can therefore be writen in a text editor which supports plain text as output format and put under version control.

You can convert DocBook via XSLT to any other document format you want. XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation.

Stylesheets for converting DocBook to common output are available, e.g. to convert into HTML, pdf, java help or Unix man pages.

To translate the DocBook source file into other formats you need:

DocBook has two main document class, book and article.

The following is an example of a DocBook document:

				
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" "../docbook-xml-4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<article>
	<articleinfo>
		<title>DocBook Intro</title>
		<author>
			<firstname>Lars</firstname>
			<surname>Vogel</surname>
		</author>
	</articleinfo>
	<sect1 label="1.0">
		<title>An introduction to DocBook</title>
		<para> 
			This is text.
		</para>
	</sect1>
</article>

			

To create DocBook files and to convert them into other formats you have to use :

We will use Eclipse as an XML editor, Xalan as the XSLT parser and Apache Ant for the XSLT transformation.