Using DocBook on Windows

Long time ago, I bookmarked Jim Crafton's tutorial Documentation with Docbook on Windows to follow later in the hopes of installing (and using) docbook on my Windows box. Today I finally decided to download Cygwin

Following his instructions I installed the following:

• bash
• make
• libxslt
• sed
• tar
• gzip
• find

and ofcouse Docbook-xsl-* and HTML Help Workshop by Microsoft.

At first I had selected UNIX like configuration but changed it to DOS like based on his suggestion.

I fired up the shell (Start > Programs > Cygwin > Cygwin Bash Shell) and was greeted with the following message:

Copying skeleton files.
These files are for the user to personalise
their cygwin experience.

These will never be overwritten.

`./.bashrc' -> `/home/user//.bashrc'
`./.bash_profile' -> `/home/user//.bash_profile'
`./.inputrc' -> `/home/user//.inputrc'

user@SRV31 ~
$

I tested whether xsltproc was installed:

xsltproc -version

Then I created a "HelloWorld" to test out the installation. I created HelloWorld.xml and placed some content (see Jim's tutorial for an example).

Docbook is organized as:
Book > Chapter > Section

Run through XSL processor after making sure that our XML file is valid and begins with

<?xml version="1.0">

and use "/" for paths.

I installed all the necessary XSL files with Cygwin (recommended) so I ran the following command to test my book

I navigated to cd /home/user/docbook/book
and than ran:

user@SRV31 ~/docbook/book
$ xsltproc --nonet /usr/share/docbook-xsl/htmlhelp/htmlhelp.xsl /home/user/d
ocbook/HelloWorld.xml
Writing pr01.html for preface
Writing ch01.html for chapter
Writing ch02.html for chapter
Writing index.html for book
Writing htmlhelp.hhp
Writing toc.hhc