How to generate pdf from docbook 5.0

Question

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

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