DocBook is a fairly complex format and using and customizing the XSL style sheets available is not really straightforward. So by googling left and right and looking at other DocBook rendering frameworks that are in the open source, we tried to model similarities and sometimes just copied some of the ideas.
This DocBook Framework is literally standing on the shoulders of other projects, in particular:
The DocBook Format by Norman Walsh; (C)
1999-2006 by Norman Walsh, OASIS and O'Reilly, especially all the
documentation that is available from
http://www.docbook.org/
The DocBook FAQ maintained by Dave Pawson
and available from http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/
. We
wouldn't have survived without it.
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide by Bob
Stayton. This is an invaluable reference to the DocBook style sheets.
Find it online at http://sagehill.net/
or buy the
E-book.
The DocBook Project located at
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/
. They maintain the XSL
style sheets used to transform DocBook into other formats and also
link to the docbook mailing list archives.
The Apache XML commons resolver available
from
http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/resolver/
The XMLmind XML Editor from XMLMind,
available through http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/
This
cross-platform, pure Java editor not only runs well on Linux, Windows
and MacOS but also offers DocBook WYSIWYG support and has a free
version! And if you pay for it, you get the source code for it
too.
Ideas on how to render elements, to arrange things and how to do more obscure things like title pages or use CSS to render HTML, we've taken (sometimes literally by cut and paste) from the following projects:
The Spring Framework documentation. It
hooked us on the idea that Velocity should have DocBook documentation,
too. Their DocBook framework is really nice, however it proved to be
'not exactly what we were looking for' (see above). Spring is an
example on how good documentation makes all the difference between a
successful and popular project and 'the others'. Thanks a lot, Spring
guys! Download Spring Framework from
http://www.springframework.org/
.
The "ant and docbook" styler suite by Dawid
Weiss, available from
http://www.cs.put.poznan.pl/dweiss/xml/projects/ant-docbook-styler/index.xml
. We stole his CSS style sheet almost verbatim. Thanks a lot,
Dawid!
The Maven sdocbook plugin by Siegfried
Goeschl, Per Olesen and Carlos Sanchez, available at the SourceForge
Maven plugin page at
http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/maven-sdocbook-plugin/