Tille's Site

DocBook general info

Links:

GUI Editors

Personally I prefer vim, but you might to try one of these if you like to click and point:

(mind that, as always when using GUIs, it is advisable to know something about the supporting technologies):

oXygen: 30-days trial, fast registration by E-mail. Can validate your code and convert to PDF.
XMLmind XML editor: free and professional edition available.
Conglomerate: claims to be an XML editor that everybody can use.

mind that, as always when using GUIs, it is advisable to know something about the supporting technologies. A GUI is but a small part of the answer to any given question.

Convertors

GUI conversion:

w2XML converts Word files to XML
OpenOffice can export files as DocBook, using a simplified tag set
WordPerfect supports DocBook

I prefer xsltproc, see steps for installation.

Apart from xsltproc for converting to on-line formats, I use fop from the Apache XML project for converting to printed output like PDF.

Source code examples

HOWTOs

TLDP CVS has lots of examples. See here for convertion to other formats:

Books

You can download the source of my first book (Introduction to Linux), which is an example of how to use and link chapter files. See an HTML conversion example using a customized stylesheet.

Troubleshooting

UTF-8

I'd like to use the UTF-8 character set definition so that all the characters I need are supported. Recently I changed web servers and all of a sudden my docs looked very ugly (All tabs were replaced with Latin capital A with a circumflex). I use this declaration in my DocBook XML sources:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

David Horton (TLDP volunteer) suggested a workaround using the HTML stylesheets instead of the XHTML stylesheets in the conversion process (see here) but the problem is really with the Apache configuration.

My Apache server was configured to use ISO-8859-1:

# Default charset to iso-8859-1 (ttp://www.apache.org/info/css-security/).

This can also be checked using the command wget --save-headers http://your_site.

I changed this directive to

AddDefaultCharset off

And everything looked good again. There was a Bugzilla report about this annoying default setting.

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