DocBook

DocBook

DocBook is a vocabulary for technical books and articles, defined in RELAX NG with Schematron rules. DocBook 5.2 (6 February 2024) is the last OASIS Standard: the Technical Committee closed in September 2024 and the project continues independently at docbook.org (https://docbook.org/ 116,035 ), whose current release is 5.2.1 (19 March 2026). Its stylesheets, DocBook xslTNG 2.7.1, are XSLT 3.0 and run on Saxon 726,956 :

guide.xml: a DocBook 5.2 articleXML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.2" xml:id="feed-guide">
  <info><title>The BookNest Catalog Feed</title>
    <author><personname>BookNest Data Team</personname></author></info>
  <section xml:id="format">
    <title>Format</title>
    <para>Each <tag>book</tag> carries a SKU, a <tag>price</tag> and an availability
      flag. Validate the feed with <command>xmllint</command> before loading it.</para>
    <programlisting language="bash">xmllint --schema catalog.xsd feed.xml</programlisting>
  </section>
</article>

Validating with Jing, then HTML through xslTNG

jing ~/xml-tools/docbook/docbook-5.2.rng guide.xml && echo "valid DocBook 5.2"
java -jar ~/xml-tools/docbook-xslTNG-2.7.1/libs/docbook-xslTNG-2.7.1.jar guide.xml > guide.html
grep -o -E '<h[12][^>]*>.{0,60}' guide.html | head -n 2

Output

valid DocBook 5.2
<h1>The BookNest Catalog Feed</h1><div class="author"><h3><span 
<h2><span class="label">1</span><span class="sep">. </span>Forma

Semantic markup lets one source produce HTML, EPUB and, through XSL-FO (Peripheral XML Standards), PDF.

DocBook documents technical information. As a semantic language that captures the structure of a document, DocBook is neutral in presentation. Its content can be published in a variety of formats, including HTML 30 , XHTML 30 , EPUB 30 , PDF 30 , man pages 30 , Web help, and HTML Help 30 .

The example below defines a simple DocBook 5.0 book containing two chapters.

ch11-docbook-book.xmlXML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<book xml:id="simple_book"
          xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" version="5.0">
   <title>Very simple book</title>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
      <title>Chapter 1</title>
      <para>HTML</para>
      <para>HTML deals with many <emphasis>tags</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>
   <chapter xml:id="chapter_2">
      <title>Chapter 2</title>
      <para>CSS</para>
   </chapter>
</book>

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