Chapter 9. DocBook and HTML document type definitions

Use a real-world DTD/stylesheet package and the HTML DTDs to test your system and to equip it for productive work

The DocBook SGML DTD and Norman Walsh's DocBook DSSSL stylesheets are well suited to write handbooks and other technical documentations (and lots of other stuff too) and publish them either as a set of hyperlinked HTML pages or as a printable document. What you are reading right now has been authored using DocBook.

We will install the latest version of the DocBook SGML DTD. If you intend to work with existing DocBook documents that use older DTDs, you will need to install them as well. The procedure is exactly the same as outlined below.

Norman Walsh's DocBook stylesheets contain a Perl script for the generation of an index. Although it may seem a bit exaggerated to install Perl just to run a single script, there is no way out if you want to automatically create indices for DocBook documents, and probably you will find more useful scripts to feed your Perl interpreter with.

The HTML DTDs are also included in this chapter for two reasons. First, they are useful to write HTML pages that comply with the W3C specifications. Second, most of the necessary files are already on your harddisk as they are included in the SP suite.