Fun generating LDP DocBook XML on Debian

It took a few shots to get this going, but it seems to work now. You’ll need (most of) these to get started.

docbook
docbook-defguide
docbook-dsssl
docbook-utils
docbook-xml
docbook-xsl
ldp-docbook-dsssl
jade

You’ll also need to create an XML catalog, which does not yet exist for Debian. Fortunately James Henstridge has provided a script which will generate the catalog for those of us less familiar with the whole XML toolchain configuration process.

Once that’s setup, all you need is a DocBook XML file that you want to output to html chunks with sanely named files and a functional table of contents. (None of which you get with xmlto for example, which just creates the files with random names and no section numbers.) I executed jade with the following arguments.

jade -t xml -i html -d /usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/ldp/ldp.dsl#html \
/usr/share/sgml/declaration/xml.dcl traffic_shaping.xml

The above syntax and setup is briefly described at LDP. By default it drops the output files in the current working directory.

You can produced HTML files with sane names by including an id tag in your sectN tags.


If you’re new to DocBook XML, learn by doing. You can check out the actual source for all the LDP DocBook XML guides through the r.