Norm Walsh has just issued DocBook NG: The “PTO” Release.

Changes are primarily around XInclude support and the section content models.

This may very well be the final NG release prior to the DocBook V5.0 alpha release we are planning for August.

Please try this out, and report any problems ASAP! Norm has been gracious enough to also produce a Simplified NG version of "PTO", available at: http://docbook.org/docbook-ng/simple/pto/index.html :-)

See also: DocBook

It's been a few months since the last stylesheet update, but I think it's been worth the wait! Michael Smith has announced the release of version 1.69.0 of the DocBook XSL stylesheets. This is not the production release, but the public experimental release. If no bugs are found, a 1.69.1 version should be released in short order.

The stylesheets can be found at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/

Changes in this release include:

* This release adds localizations for the following languages: Albanian,
    Amharic, Azerbaijani, Hindi, Irish (Gaelic), Gujarati, Kannada, Mongolian,
    Oriya, Punjabi, Tagalog, Tamil, and Welsh.

  * Added support for specifying number format for auto labels for chapter,
    appendix, part, and preface. Contolled with the appendix.autolabel,
    chapter.autolabel, part.autolabel, and preface.autolabel parameters.

  * Added basic support for biblioref cross referencing.

  * Added support for align on caption in mediaobject.

  * Added support for processing documents that use the DocBook V5 namespace.

  * Added support for termdef and mathphrase.

  * EXPERIMENTAL: Incorporated the Slides and Website stylesheets into the
    DocBook XSL stylesheets package. So, for example, Website documents can
    now be processed using the following URI for the driver Website
    tabular.xsl file:

    http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/website/tabular.xsl

  * A procedure without a title is now treated as an "informal" procedure
    (meaning that it is not added to any generated "list of procedures" and
    has no affect on numbering of generated labels for other procedures).

  * docname is no longer added to olink when pointing to a root element.

  * Added support for generation of choice separator in inline simplelist.
    This enables auto-generation of an appropriate localized "choice
    separator" (for example, "and" or "or") before the final item in an inline
    simplelist.

    As a temporary workaround for the fact that most of the DocBook
    non-English locale files don't have a localization for the word "or", you
    can put in a literal string to be used; example for French:
    <?dbchoice choice="ou">. That is, use "ou" instead of "or".

FO

  * Added content-type property to external-graphic element, based on
    imagedata format attribute.

  * Added support for generating <rx:meta-field creator="$VERSION"/> field for
    XEP output. This makes the DocBook XSL stylesheet version information
    available through the Document Properties menu in Acrobat Reader and other
    PDF viewers.

  * Trademark symbol handling made consistent with handling of same in HTML
    stylesheets. Prior to this change, if you processed a document that
    contained no value for the class attribute on the trademark element, the
    HTML stylesheets would default to rendering a superscript TM symbol after
    the trademark contents, but the FO stylesheets would render nothing.

  * Added support for generating XEP bookmarks for refentry.

  * Added support for HTML markup table border attribute, applied to each
    table cell.

  * The table.width template can now sum column specs if none use % or *.

  * Added fox:destination extension inside fox:outline to support linking to
    internal destinations.

  * Added support for customizing abstract with property sets. Controlled with
    the abstract.properties and abstract.title.properties parameters.

  * Add footnotes in table title to table footnote set, and add support for
    table footnotes to HTML table markup.

  * Added support for title in glosslist.

  * Added support for itemizedlist symbol none.

  * Implemented the new graphical.admonition.properties and
    nongraphical.admonition.properties attribute sets.

  * Added id to formalpara and some other blocks that were missing it.

  * Changed the anchor template to output fo:inline instead of fo:wrapper.

  * Added support for toc.max.depth parameter.

Help

  * Eclipse Help: Added support for generating olink database.

HTML

  * Added a first cut at support in HTML output for DocBook 5 style
    annotations. Controlled using the annotation.support parameter, and
    implemented using JavaScript and CSS styling. For more details, see the
    documentation for the annotation.js, annotation.css,
    annotation.graphic.open, and annotation.graphic.close parameters.

  * Generate client-side image map for imageobjectco with areas using calspair
    units

  * Added support for <?img.src.path?> PI.

  * Added support for passing img.src.path to DocBook Java XSLT image
    extensions when appropriate. Controlled using the
    graphicsize.use.img.src.path parameter.

  * Added support for (not valid for DocBook 4) xlink:href on area and (not
    valid for DocBook 4) alt in area.

  * Added new parameter default.table.frame to control table framing if there
    is no frame attribute on a table.

  * Added initial, experimental support for generating content for the HTML
    title attribute from content of the alt element. This change adds support
    for the following inline elements only (none of them are block elements):
    abbrev, accel, acronym, action, application, authorinitials, beginpage,
    citation, citerefentry, citetitle, city, classname, code, command,
    computeroutput, constant, country, database, email, envar, errorcode,
    errorname, errortext, errortype, exceptionname, fax, filename, firstname,
    firstterm, foreignphrase, function, glossterm, guibutton, guiicon,
    guilabel, guimenu, guimenuitem, guisubmenu, hardware, honorific, interface
    , interfacename, keycap, keycode, keysym, lineage, lineannotation, literal
    , markup, medialabel, methodname, mousebutton, option, optional, otheraddr
    , othername, package, parameter, personname, phone, pob, postcode,
    productname, productnumber, prompt, property, quote, refentrytitle, remark
    , replaceable, returnvalue, sgmltag, shortcut, state, street, structfield,
    structname, subscript, superscript, surname, symbol, systemitem, tag,
    termdef, token, trademark, type, uri, userinput, varname, and wordasword

  * Added support for chunking revhistory into separate file (similar to the
    support for doing same with legalnotice). Patch from Thomas Schraitle.
    Controlled through new generate.revhistory.link parameter.

  * l10n.xsl: Made language codes RFC compliant. Added a new boolean config
    parameter, l10n.lang.value.rfc.compliant. If it is non-zero (the default),
    any underscore in a language code will be converted to a hyphen in HTML
    output. If it is zero, the language code will be left as-is.

Thank you to all who have contributed to the bug fixes, stylesheet coding, and testing! Thank you as well to everyone in the DocBook user community for your feedback and continued support of DocBook!

See also: DocBook

Lars Trieloff has created a DocBook Cheat Sheet based on Jeff Beal's DocBook Quick Reference Card. Very handy! Thanks, Lars. Details are available at: Software Documentation Weblog

See also: DocBook

Bruce D'Arcus has just announced the CiteProc project.

This project uses DocBook NG, MODS from the Library of Congress, and formatted with his citation style language (CSL).

Bruce is also working on the OpenOffice bibliographic project, which may incorporate some of this technology.

Check it out at: http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/citeproc.html. Thanks, Bruce!

See also: DocBook