How to generate pdf from docbook 5.0

Question

I've written a docbook 5.0 document with the header:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book version="5.0" xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
      xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
      xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
      xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
      xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"
      xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">

and docbook2pdf on Ubuntu 9.10 prints many error messages and doesn't do any pdf document. The errors are:

openjade:test.xml:2:0:E: prolog can't be omitted unless CONCUR NO and LINK EXPLICIT NO and either IMPLYDEF ELEMENT YES or IMPLYDEF DOCTYPE YES
openjade:test.xml:2:0:E: no document type declaration; will parse without validation
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/print/dbtitle.dsl:18:5:E: flow objects at the root must be all of class scroll or all of class page-sequence or simple-page-sequence
openjade:/usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/dsssl/modular/print/dbbibl.dsl:704:4:E: flow objects at the root must be all of class scroll or all of class page-sequence or simple-page-sequence

docbook2pdf for document in the docbook 4.5 format with normal header like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">

works quite OK.

Is there any way to generate pdf from docbook 5.0?

Answer 1

I see three options (available in Debian/Ubuntu) to generate pdf from docbook:

• jade, which provides the docbook2pdf command the asker used. jade is ancient and works with SGML, which predates XML and does not support Unicode; it also lacks support for docbook 5.

• the docbook-xsl stylesheets which go through XSL-FO. docbook-xsl is for docbook 4.5, docbook-xsl-ns is for docbook5. Use fop to go from XSL-FO to PDF. Pipeline: docbook5 —(xsl)—> xml.fo —(fop)—> pdf . Commands involved: xsltproc, fop.

• dblatex, which is primarily targeting docbook4.5 but has been updated for some of docbook5.

xmlto can drive the last two, although it currently defaults to docbook-xsl and not docbook-xsl-ns.

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A quick Docbook5 user guide

Prerequisites

sudo aptitude install docbook5 docbook-xsl-ns xsltproc fop xmlto libxml2-utils xmlstarlet

Validation

xmlstarlet val --err --xsd /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/xsd/5.0/docbook.xsd book.xml

PDF output

xsltproc /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/docbook-xsl-ns/fo/docbook.xsl book.xml > book.fo
fop -fo book.fo -pdf book.pdf