Some notes about installing DocBook tools on OS X Lion.
I used to write my documents and slides almost exclusively with $\LaTeX$ and Context. Needless to say, this means tweaking default layout a lot (who said that $\LaTeX$ allows for a perfect separation between layout and content?!), so that for small-size documents I now tend to rely on Pandoc.
Lastly, I tried to use Pandoc for outputing DocBook document which I find pretty convenient for web display. It’s been almost three years now since the latest time I wrote xml files. Pandoc is already very helpful for $\LaTeX$ (with or without the xetex backend), and I even created basic templates for writing Beamer slides in Markdown. For DocBook, I can produce a fairly decent output using xsltproc which comes with OS X. In the Makefile for a tutorial on exploratory data analysis with R, I put something like:
xsltproc --xinclude --stringparam html.stylesheet docbook-xsl.css -o eda_r.html \
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/docbook.xsl eda_r.xml
It works like a charm. However, I would like to use xmlto which is built around xsltproc but handles everything in a smoother way.
We need to install gettext and getopt (with support for --longoptions, contrary to the default /usr/bin/getopt that ships with OS X).
First of all, get the latest source tarball of gettext from GNU website.
To compile gettext 0.18.1.1, you have to run the classical combo:
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install
I had to patch gettext-tools/gnulib-lib/stpncpy.c as follows:
#ifndef weak_alias
-# define __stpncpy stpncpy
+# define __stpncpy gnu_stpncpy
#endif
Then, go forward with getopt, which is available at http:/software.frodo.looijaard.name/getopt/:
$ wget http://software.frodo.looijaard.name/getopt/files/getopt-1.1.4.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf getopt-1.1.4.tar.gz
$ cd getopt-1.1.4
In the Makefile, update the LDFLAGS so it reads LDFLAGS=-lintl (which is used for internationalization support in other packages). An alternative would be to type directly LDFLAGS="-lintl" make -e. Yes, that’s a bunch of external dependencies for a small program that basically acts as a wrapper around xsltproc.
Now, we can install xmlto. Before that, we need to install the Docbook stylesheets, as well as DocBook 4.2 files. This is well explained here and I follow those instructions. Basically, this means to:
Create a catalog file in /etc:
$ sudo mkdir /etc/xml
$ sudo xmlcatalog --noout --create /etc/xml/catalog
Install the latest xsl and xml in /usr/local/share/docbook/ (I only download 4.2 and 4.4). In my case, it is
xml/4.2
xml/4.4
xsl/1.76.1
Update the XML catalog
$ sudo xmlcatalog --noout --add 'nextCatalog' '' \
'file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xsl/1.76.1/catalog.xml' --create /etc/xml/catalog
$ sudo xmlcatalog --noout --add 'nextCatalog' '' \
'file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xml/4.2/catalog.xml' --create /etc/xml/catalog
$ sudo xmlcatalog --noout --add 'nextCatalog' '' \
'file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xml/4.4/catalog.xml' --create /etc/xml/catalog
This results in /etc/xml/catalog now reading like this:
$ less /etc/xml/catalog
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE catalog PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD Entity Resolution XML Catalog V1.0//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/entity/release/1.0/catalog.dtd">
<catalog xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:entity:xmlns:xml:catalog">
<nextCatalog catalog="file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xsl/1.76.1/catalog.xml"/>
<nextCatalog catalog="file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xml/4.2/catalog.xml"/>
<nextCatalog catalog="file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xml/4.4/catalog.xml"/>
</catalog>
That’s it!
I used a template (article) I found and tested xmlto by running the following command:
$ xmlto html-nochunks sample.xml
Trying pdf backend gave me some error that I need to investigate, though. However, it works well with fop.
$ xsltproc --xinclude --output sample.fo \
/usr/local/share/docbook/xsl/1.76.1/fo/docbook.xsl \
sample.xml
$ fop sample.fo sample.pdf
There are other tools that can be installed for those interested in managing DocBook documents, especially when PDF is the expected output format. I can think of jade, but there are also dblatex and dbcontext, see DocBook to LaTeX Publishing. Apache fop works well too.