AsciiDoc DocBook XSL Stylesheets Notes

Output file customisation is achieved by tweaking the DocBook XSL stylesheets. I’ve tried to keep customization to a minimum and confine it to the separate XSL driver files in the distribution ./docbook-xsl/ directory (see the User Guide for details).

To polish some rough edges I’ve written some patches for the DocBook XSL stylesheets — you don’t need them but they’re documented below and included in the distribution ./docbook-xsl/ directory.

Manually upgrading Debian to the latest DocBook XSL stylesheets

The DocBook XSL Stylesheets distribution is just a directory full of text files and you can switch between releases by changing the directory name in the system XML catalog.

To upgrade to the latest docbook-xsl stylesheets without having to wait for the Debian docbook-xsl package:

Download the latest docbook-xsl tarball from https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets. Bleeding edge snapshots can be found at https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets/releases.

Unzip the tarball to /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/:

$ cd /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet
$ sudo tar -xzf /tmp/docbook-xsl-1.72.0.tar.gz

Edit /etc/xml/docbook-xsl.xml catalog and replace occurrences of the current stylesheets directory with the new one (in our example it would be /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/docbook-xsl-1.72.0.
```
$ cd /etc/xml/
$ sudo cp -p docbook-xsl.xml docbook-xsl.xml.ORIG
$ sudo vi docbook-xsl.xml
```

Customizing Generated Text

An example DocBook XSL Stylesheets customization file for formatting chapter titles without chapter numbering.

custom-chapter.xml

<!-- Customize chapter title -->
<l:i18n xmlns:l="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/xmlns/l10n/1.0">
  <l:l10n language="en">
    <l:context name="title">
      <l:template name="chapter" text="%t"/>
    </l:context>
  </l:l10n>
</l:i18n>

Executed with this xsltproc parameter:

--param local.l10n.xml document\(\'custom-chapter.xml\'\)

This example is hypothetical — use the xsltproc --stringparam chapter.autolabel 0 option to do the same job.