docbook2X: db2x

db2x_xsltproc
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Name

db2x_xsltproc — XSLT processor invocation wrapper

Synopsis

db2x_xsltproc [options] xml-document

Description

db2x_xsltproc invokes the XSLT 1.0 processor for docbook2X.

This command applies the XSLT stylesheet (usually given by the --stylesheet option) to the XML document in the file xml-document. The result is written to standard output (unless changed with --output).

To read the source XML document from standard input, specify - as the input document.

Options

--version: Display the docbook2X version.

Transformation output options

--output file, -o file: Write output to the given file (or URI), instead of standard output.

Source document options

--xinclude, -I

Process XInclude directives in the source document.

--sgml, -S

Indicate that the input document is SGML instead of XML. You need this set this option if xml-document is actually a SGML file.

SGML parsing is implemented by conversion to XML via sgml2xml from the SP package (or osx from the OpenSP package). All tag names in the SGML file will be normalized to lowercase (i.e. the -xlower option of sgml2xml is used). ID attributes are available for the stylesheet (i.e. option -xid). In addition, any ISO SDATA entities used in the SGML document are automatically converted to their XML Unicode equivalents. (This is done by a sed filter.)

The encoding of the SGML document, if it is not us-ascii, must be specified with the standard SP environment variables: SP_CHARSET_FIXED=1 SP_ENCODING=encoding. (Note that XML files specify their encoding with the XML declaration <?xml version="1.0" encoding="encoding" ?> at the top of the file.)

The above conversion options cannot be changed. If you desire different conversion options, you should invoke sgml2xml manually, and then pass the results of that conversion to this program.

Retrieval options

--catalogs catalog-files, -C catalog-files

Specify additional XML catalogs to use for resolving Formal Public Identifiers or URIs. SGML catalogs are not supported.

These catalogs are not used for parsing an SGML document under the --sgml option. Use the environment variable SGML_CATALOG_FILES instead to specify the catalogs for parsing the SGML document.

--network, -N

db2x_xsltproc will normally refuse to load external resources from the network, for security reasons. If you do want to load from the network, set this option.

Usually you want to have installed locally the relevent DTDs and other files, and set up catalogs for them, rather than load them automatically from the network.

Stylesheet options

--stylesheet file, -s file

Specify the filename (or URI) of the stylesheet to use. The special values man and texi are accepted as abbreviations, to specify that xml-document is in DocBook and should be converted to man pages or Texinfo (respectively).

--param name=expr, -p name=expr

Add or modify a parameter to the stylesheet. name is a XSLT parameter name, and expr is an XPath expression that evaluates to the desired value for the parameter. (This means that strings must be quoted, in addition to the usual quoting of shell arguments; use --string-param to avoid this.)

--string-param name=string, -g name=string

Add or modify a string-valued parameter to the stylesheet.

The string must be encoded in UTF-8 (regardless of the locale character encoding).

Debugging and profiling

--debug, -d

Display, to standard error, logs of what is happening during the XSL transformation.

--nesting-limit n, -D n

Change the maximum number of nested calls to XSL templates, used to detect potential infinite loops. If not specified, the limit is 500 (libxslt’s default).

--profile, -P

Display profile information: the total number of calls to each template in the stylesheet and the time taken for each. This information is output to standard error.

--xslt-processor processor, -X processor

Select the underlying XSLT processor used. The possible choices for processor are: libxslt, saxon, xalan-j.

The default processor is whatever was set when docbook2X was built. libxslt is recommended (because it is lean and fast), but SAXON is much more robust and would be more helpful when debugging stylesheets.

All the processors have XML catalogs support enabled. (docbook2X requires it.) But note that not all the options above work with processors other than the libxslt one.

Environment

XML_CATALOG_FILES: Specify XML Catalogs. If not specified, the standard catalog (/etc/xml/catalog) is loaded, if available.
DB2X_XSLT_PROCESSOR: Specify the XSLT processor to use. The effect is the same as the --xslt-processor option. The primary use of this variable is to allow you to quickly test different XSLT processors without having to add --xslt-processor to every script or make file in your documentation build system.

Conforming to

XML Stylesheet Language – Transformations (XSLT), version 1.0, a W3C Recommendation.

Notes

In its earlier versions (< 0.8.4), docbook2X required XSLT extensions to run, and db2x_xsltproc was a special libxslt-based processor that had these extensions compiled-in. When the requirement for XSLT extensions was dropped, db2x_xsltproc became a Perl script which translates the options to db2x_xsltproc to conform to the format accepted by the stock xsltproc which comes with libxslt.

The prime reason for the existence of this script is backward compatibility with any scripts or make files that invoke docbook2X. However, it also became easy to add in support for invoking other XSLT processors with a unified command-line interface. Indeed, there is nothing special in this script to docbook2X, or even to DocBook, and it may be used for running other sorts of stylesheets if you desire. Certainly the author prefers using this command, because its invocation format is sane and is easy to use. (e.g. no typing long class names for the Java-based processors!)