XMLDoc Introduction

XML-doc is a collection of stylesheets and utilities, resembling a documentation system like sgmltools and Linuxdoc. The objective is to prepare documentation in XML format. Other formats, like LaTeX, PostScript or HTML are then generated by transforming the XML source document into other formats. The transformation is performed by an XSLT processor and using XSL stylesheets for a specific output format.

Downloads

Source:

• xmldoc-0.10.tar.gz

Debian package:

• xmldoc_0.10-1_amd64.deb
• xmldoc_0.10-1_i386.deb
• Raspberry Pi: xmldoc_0.10-1_armhf.deb

Installing XMLDoc

XMLDoc uses the XML and XSLT software libraries from GNOME. You first need to download, configure, make and install these packages from the XML C Library site. Make sure you get the latest libxml2 and libxslt libraries.

The Gnome xml and xslt libraries are also included in the latest Linux distributions, such as RedHat 7.x. You can install the libxml2 and libxslt RPM packages if they are not already installled on your system. To compile the XSLT Processor xp, you also need to install the libxml2-devel and libxslt-devel packages.

Download and unpack the XMLDoc utilities, stylesheets and DTDs from here. The tarball unpacks into a directory 'xmldoc-0.10'. In there you will find:

• A special version of an XSLT Processor, called xp. This XSLT processor performs the translation of ASCII characters that have a special meaning in LaTeX and a number of UTF-8 sequences into escape sequences for LaTeX.
• The shell scripts xml2html, xml2latex and xml2text. These are pretty simple scripts that just call xp with the proper stylesheets.
• The XSL stylesheets html.xsl, latex.xsl and text.xsl that are used by the XSLT processor to transform the XML document into HTML or LaTeX.
• The Document Type Definitions doc.dtd and xsl.dtd to define the structure of the XML files.
• A guide in the doc subdirectory which explains the features in XMLDoc. You may want to use this guide and its makefile as an example.

XMLDoc uses automake and autoconf to compile and install the software. To install XMLDoc, you can do the usual ./configure, make and (as root) make install. NOTE: On some systems, you may need to do a automake --add-missing before doing the make.

The stylesheets and DTDs are installed in /usr/local/xslt. The utilities go into /usr/local/bin. A 'make install' will copy all necessary files to their proper place. If you want the stylesheets in a different place, you'll have to run the configure script with a --prefix=/other/dir argument.

Using XMLDoc

You are now ready to start writing in XML. Prepare your documents with your favorite editor as usual, doing all the proper XML stuff and use the guide to see how you can make the structure and layout. Convert you document to HTML with xml2html filename.xml, to LaTeX with xml2latex filename.xml or to plain ASCII text with xml2text filename.xml. Both scripts accept a single argument and send their output to stdout. There is one option to these scripts: -s stylesheet allows you to use a stylesheet different from the default. That's all there is to it; enjoy.

Patches

Related projects

• The XML C library for Gnome
• DocBook
• DocBook Open repository

If you encounter any problems or if you want to make suggestions, please don't hesitate to drop me an Email