What is it ?

Ant4docbook is an ant task for processing docbook xml documents.

DocBook is a semantic markup language for writing technical documentation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<article xml:lang="en" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <title>My first docbook article</title>
  <section id="section1">
    <title>Section level 1</title>
    <para>
    write your documentation
    </para>
  </section>
</article>

Apache Ant is a xml tool for writing scripts :

<project name="ant-project" default="todo">
  <target name="todo">
    <!-- define ant task here, such as <dbk> task -->
    <dbk file="docbook.xml" tofile="file.html">
  </target>
</project>

Please see : documentation for descriptions and samples.

Why ?

Why another docbook processing tool when there are already many ones?

Even if these tools do their jobs as they have to do, it is sometimes quiet difficult to install/use/customize them.

Ant4docbook aims to be:

  • easy to use. Ant4docbook package contains all tools and dependencies
  • easy to customize
  • cross platform

News

[2023-mm-dd] ant for docbook V0.10 released.

Features :

  • use case: docbook + csv

[2022-11-29] ant for docbook V0.9 released.

Features :

  • use case: docbook + pandoc
  • use case: markdown + xinclude

Dependencies:

  • Use docbook xsl v1.79.1 => v1.79.2
  • Use fop v2.8

[2016-01-03] ant for docbook V0.8 released.

Features :

  • docbook + graphics (Plantuml)
  • process markdown as an input file

Bugs :

  • BUG#031 : FOUserAgent: Image not found. ERROR FOUserAgent: Image not found. URI: <path/to/file>.png. (No context info available) Correction: Use the input file as reference, instead of project base dir for fo proc.

Dependencies:

  • Use docbook xsl v1.78.1 => v1.79.1
  • Use fop v1.1 => v2.0 (and xmlgraphics v2.0.1)
  • [2014-07-09] ant for docbook V0.7.1 released.Bugs:
  • [BUG#024] Dist size

[2014-04-06] ant for docbook V0.7 released.

Features:

  • docbook + plain text content (markdown)

[2014-01-05] ant for docbook V0.6 released.

Features:

  • dbk to epub processing

Bugs:

  • [BUG#011] XInclude fails when using DOCTYPE in included xml files
  • [BUG#016] FileNotFoundException: /path/to/docbookx.dtd
  • [BUG#022] ERROR FOUserAgent: Invalid property value encountered in column-width="10%%”

Dependencies:

  • Use docbook xsl v1.78.0 => v1.78.1

  • Use fop v1.0 => v1.1 (and xmlgraphics v1.5)

  • Use org.jdom.jdom V1.1 => V2.0.2

    [dbk-xslt] FATAL ERROR: Xalan processor not supported by DocBook Epub3 stylesheets. Xalan does not properly support XSL output method="text”, which is required for the various epub support files.

[2012-12-16] ant for docbook V0.5 released.

Features:

  • dbk preprocessing with freemarker engine

[2012-07-01] ant for docbook V0.4 released.

Features:

  • dbk to pdf images processing

Bugs:

  • [BUG#005] Image not available. Reason: org.apache.xmlgraphics.image.loader. ImageException: The file format is not supported
  • [BUG#006] Release fix for “The file format is not supported. No ImagePreloader found

[2011-09-25] ant for docbook V0.3 released.

Features:

  • dbk to pdf customization with parameters

[2011-03-27] ant for docbook V0.2 released.

Features:

  • dbk to html and pdf processing

Bugs:

  • [BUG#004] Xslt processing failed with default JRE (thanks to Susanne Wunsch)
  • [BUG#003] fo processing failure, due to windows directory permissions
  • [BUG#002] xinclude failure on windows
  • [BUG#001] java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/jdom/Document