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The first line specifies the DTD to be used and the root element; in this case we are creating an article using the DocBook DTD. The rest of the source contains the article itself. If you are familiar with HTML, the markup language used for the World Wide Web (see the O'Reilly book HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy), this should look a bit familiar. Tags are used to mark up the text logically.

Describing the whole DocBook DTD is well beyond the scope of this book, but if you are interested, check out DocBook: The Definitive Guide by Norman Walsh and Leonard Muellner (O'Reilly).

Once you have your article, documentation, or book written, you will want to transform it, of course, into a format that you can print or view on the screen. In order to do this, you need a complete XML setup, which, unfortunately, is not easy to achieve. In fact, you need so many pieces in place that we cannot describe this here. But there is hope: a number of distributions (including Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian) come with very good XML setups out of the box; just install their respective XML packages. If you have a working SGML or XML system, you should be able to transform the text shown previously to HTML (as one example) with a command like this:

tigger$ db2html myarticle.xml

input file was called — output will be in myarticle

TMPDIR is db2html.C14157

working on /home/kalle/myarticle.xml

about to copy cascading stylesheet and admon graphics to temp dir

about to rename temporary directory to "myarticle"

The file myarticle/t1.html will contain the generated HTML. If you would like to generate PDF instead, use the following command:

tigger db2pdf myarticle.xml

tex output file name is /home/kalle/projects/rl5/test.tex

tex file name is /home/kalle/projects/rl5/test.tex

pdf file name is test.pdf

This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)

entering extended mode

(/home/kalle/projects/rl5/test.tex

JadeTeX 2003/04/27: 3.13

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/psnfss/t1ptm.fd)

Elements will be labelled

Jade begin document sequence at 21

(./test.aux) (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/cyrillic/t2acmr.fd)

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/ts1cmr.fd)

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/hyperref/nameref.sty) (./test.out) (./test.out)

(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/psnfss/t1phv.fd) [1.0.49{/var/lib/texmf/fonts/map/p

dftex/updmap/pdftex.map}] [2.0.49] (./test.aux) ){/usr/share/texmf/fonts/enc/dv

ips/psnfss/8r.enc}re/texmf/fonts/type1/urw/times/utmr8a.pfb>vetic/uhvb8a.pfb>

Output written on test.pdf (2 pages, 35689 bytes).

Transcript written on test.log.

As you can see, this command uses TEX in the background, or more specifically a special version called Jade that is geared toward documents produced by DSSSL.

This is all nice and good, but if you want to change the way the output looks, you'll find DSSSL is quite cumbersome to use, not least because of the lack of available documentation. We will therefore briefly introduce you here to the more modern mechanism using XSLT and FOP. However, be prepared that this will almost invariably require quite some setup work on your side, including reading ample amounts of online documentation.

In an XSLT setup, the processing chain is as follows: First, the XML document that you have written, plus a so-called stylesheet written in XSL (eXtended Stylesheet Language), are run through an XSLT (eXtended Stylesheet Language Template) processor such