Hi devs : I've gone through the idea page of DocBook and found the project idea "Extend supported output formats [1]" very interesting to me mainly because I have good background knowledge about Ant and Android. I'm doing an Android application as my level-3 software project and also I'm a fan of smart phones, specially about Android.
After I started poking around DocBook, I understood that XSLT language processor[2] get an XML source document, and an XSLT stylesheet( typically the DocBook xsl sheets [3] ) and produces an output document according to the rules are provided in XSLT style sheet. If I misunderstood the procedure, please correct me ?. I installed "XSLTProc"[4] and download the DocBook xsl style sheets from sourceforge repository [5]. Then using DocBook ubuntu documentation [6], I create a test.html file by using test.xml file. It was successfully built. I used a command similar to this *"xsltproc -o test.html /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/nwalsh/xhtml/docbook.xsl test.xml"* According to my understanding, I used a external xslt processor to transform test.xml file to test.html according to the DocBook html style sheet. As I understood, the main goal of the project is generating an another type of formats file (ex:Android,iPad) by a XSLTProcessor. So, in order to do that we want xsl style sheet which includes instructions and other directives that guide the processor in the production of the output document, right? If so, I think it's better if I looked at how the current DocBook xsl style sheets can be use to implement those output formats. Further, I'd very much appreciate if you can provide me some directives and guide me. Specially, I'm looking for documentation/articles explaining how Ant and xsl is currently used in the system. Please tell me if I missed something important !. I also need to clarify the idea which is in the idea page[1]; *“Output format packages” output by the DocBook style sheets would be easily consumable / installable by hosting applications.* What does it mean by "easily consumable / installable" ?. Can you explain further ?. As I familiar with these output formats like HTML, PDF and plain_text are information based resources. But Android supported for the .apk format that the format of applications running on Android OS. So, what are the output formats which are going to produce by "Android-xsl" sheets and for others in the list ? Further, I welcome any advices that you'd like to give for a beginner DocBook developer interested in contributing. Thank you in Advance !. [1]. http://docbook.xmlpress.net/tiki-index.php?page=Ideas2012#Extend_supported_output_formats [2]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Transformations [3]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook_XSL [4]. http://xmlsoft.org/xslt/xsltproc2.html [5]. http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/files/docbook-xsl/ [6]. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DocBook -- Regards Gihan Chanuka Karunarathne Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/gihanchanuka LinkedIn: http://lk.linkedin.com/pub/gihan-karunarathne/25/ba3/993
