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java org.apache.fop.apps.Fop -c configfile myarticle.fo myarticle.pdf

Now you know the general setup and which tools you can use; remember that there are many other similar tools available that might serve your purposes even better. You may ask where your own formatting requirements come in. At this point, all the formatting is determined by the DocBook-XSL stylesheets. And this is also where you can hook into the process. Instead of supplying the docbook.xsl file to Saxon, you can also specify your own file. Of course, you do not want to copy the tremendous amount of work that has gone into DocBook-XSL; instead, you should import the DocBook-XSL stylesheet into your stylesheet, and then overwrite some settings. Here is an example for a custom stylesheet:

xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"

version='1.0'

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/transitional"

exclude-result-prefixes="#default">

What is happening here? After the boilerplate code at the beginning, the element loads the default FOP-generating stylesheet (of course, you would use another stylesheet for HTML generation). Then we set a number of parameters; a lot of settings in DocBook-XSL are parametrized, and a element is all that is needed. In this case, we select a certain output paper format, ask for verbatim blocks to be shaded, and ask for automatic generation of table-of-contents labels for chapters.

Finally, we make a change that cannot be done merely by setting parameters: changing the color of level 1 section titles. Here we overwrite an attribute set with a color attribute of our own. For more complex changes, it is sometimes even necessary to replace element definitions from DocBook-XSL completely. This is not an easy task to do, and you would be well advised to read the DocBook-XSL documentation thoroughly.

XML opens a whole new world of tools and techniques. A good starting point for getting inspired and reading up on this is the web site of the Linux Documentation Project , which, as mentioned before, uses XML/DocBook for all its documentation. You'll find the Linux Documentation Project at http://www.tlpd.org.

groff

Parallel to and independent to TEX, another major text processing system emerged in the form of troff and nroff . These were developed at Bell Labs for the original implementation of Unix (in fact, the development of Unix was spurred, in part, to support such a text processing system). The first version of this text processor was called roff (for "runoff"); later came nroff and troff, which generated output for a particular typesetter in use at the time (nroff was written for fixed-pitch printers such as dot matrix printers, troff for proportional space devices—initially typesetters). Later versions of nroff and troff became the standard text processor on Unix systems everywhere. groff is GNU's implementation of nroff and troff that is used on Linux systems. It includes several extended features and drivers for a number of printing devices.

groff is capable of producing documents, articles, and books, much in the same vein as TEX. However, groff (as well as the original nroff ) has one intrinsic feature that is absent from TEX and variants: the ability to produce plain-ASCII output. Although TEX is great for producing documents to be printed, groff is able to produce plain ASCII to be viewed online (or printed directly as plain text on even the simplest of printers). If you're going to be producing documentation to be viewed online as well as in printed form, groff may be the way to go (although there are