6.5. XSL stylesheets

Preparing Cogent Documentation :
	Chapter 6. Tools

We are currently using the DocBook XSL stylesheets to produce HTML and Windows HTML Help. The syntax of these stylesheets uses XML markup, making them easier to understand and work with than the DSSSL stylesheets. There is more development going on for the XSL stylesheets, they are easier to use, and are well-documented. However, the print output for the XSL stylesheets goes through an intermediate step called XSL:FO (formatted objects), and right now the open-source software for producing PDFs from FO is not yet suitable for our use. When it becomes so, we plan to process all of our documents using XSL, and at that time we will most likely maintain and edit our source in XML rather than SGML. In the meantime, we use the XSL stylesheets for HTML output.

These stylesheets allow us to use CSS (cascading stylesheets) for HTML, which gives even more power and flexibility to page formatting. However, the QNX Helpviewer does not support CSS, so we continue to use the DSSSL stylesheets to process QNX Helpviewer HTML documents.

6.5.1. Making changes

Customizing the XSL stylesheets is similar to the DSSSL model. There are many parameters available, which can go into the customization file. If you need to make changes that aren't parameterized, you look in the stylesheet directory (we are currently using /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets-1.61.3/html/ for our HTML output), find the chunk of code that you need, copy it into the appropriate file, and make changes as necessary. Make sure you have a good XSL reference book at hand to help you figure out the code.

6.5.2. XSL file organization

The XSL file organization is described in the XSL_File_Organization.txt file in the doc/config/ directory. The contents of this file are as follows:

(XSL File Organization goes here.)


6.4. DSSSL stylesheets		6.6. Installing JadeTeX