Hi Critobal, Although the DocBook stylesheet has empty placeholder templates named 'front.cover' and 'back.cover', those are only called when processing a book element.
I can think of three approaches to this problem. 1. Create a book that contains just a book title and an article, where the book title matches the article title. That's valid DocBook, but it might produce artifacts like a table of contents and verso title page that you would need to turn off in the XSL, neither of which is difficult. 2. Copy the template with match="d:article" from fo/component.xsl to your customization layer, add a call to 'article.front.cover' before the main page-sequence, and write a template by that name that generates an fo:page-sequence prior to the main article page-sequence. Something like: <xsl:template match="d:article"> ... <!-- add just this line --> <xsl:call-template name="article.front.cover"/> <fo:page-sequence [existing sequence for the main article] ... </xsl:template> and write this template: <xsl:template name="article.front.cover"> <xsl:call-template name="page.sequence"> <xsl:with-param name="content"> [the fo:blocks that make up the content of the cover page] </xsl:with-param> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:template> 3. The titlepage system for article automatically calls an empty placeholder template named 'article.titlepage.before.recto' that is called before the regular title page, but within the main page-sequence. You could customize that template: <xsl:template name="article.titlepage.before.recto"> [the fo:blocks that make up the content of the cover page] <fo:block break-after="page"/> </xsl:template> This one needs the forced page break after it because it is included in the main article page-sequence. In either case, the content needs to be specified. The simplest would be to copy the article titlepage content: <xsl:call-template name="article.titlepage.recto"/> If you need less than that, then copy just the contents of that template from fo/titlepage.templates.xsl to your customized template and remove the elements you don't want on the cover. Bob Stayton Sagehill Enterprises b...@sagehill.net From: Cristobal Vio Sent: Monday, February 04, 2013 10:51 AM To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: [docbook-apps] docbook article with cover Hi there! I'm learning to use DocBook and I was trying to figure out how to make an article with coverpage... Or alternatively a book without the need of chapters (although i think I'd prefer the first thing) The xsl stylesheet scheme seems so flexible that I thought it must be possible... but i was lost in tons of sites on xsl stylesheet discussions... I will continue my search, but I thought maybe i could just ask you (since you are the one person that surely knows that already) if it was possible and maybe if you had the appropriate reference for me :) many, many thanks in advance, Cristóbal Vio Update: I've continued my search and it still isn't clear to me if I need to do a new xsl style or alter the dtd part concerning the article type. Still hoping you can answer. Thanks in advance, Cristóbal