In order to successfully use the XSL stylesheets you must have some XSLT processor. This is sufficient for generating HTML version of the documentation. If you also want to create a version suitable for printing, you will additionally need a FO processor.
This is an operating system independent section, as most of the tools are either provided for several operating systems, are written in the Java language, or provide a version in Java. This means, you can run them on virtually any operating system, where a Java Virtual Machine is available. See the Java homepage for more information.
Note: Using XSL stylesheets to generate different formats of the phpdoc XML files is optional currently. This method is not as well supported as DSSSL stylesheets, but is a promising technology. You do not need to setup any tools mentioned here if you would not like to play with XSL stylesheets. However we plan to use XSL in the future for documentation generation, and XSL is already in use in the 'new CHM edition' and with Livedocs.
The phpdoc Makefile has options to generate files using the XSL sheets, but these are currently experimental (and require xsltproc exclusively). After running ./configure you can run
make html_xsl to generate HTML files
make bightml_xsl to generate one big HTML file
make fo to generate a FO file (Formatting Objects file, which will be used by the FO processor to generate PDF files for example)
The build system only supports LibXSLT (also known as xsltproc), available as Windows binaries too at: http://www.zlatkovic.com/projects/libxml/, and also included in current Cygwin setups, if selected for installation.
Note: As we tested, other XSLT processors, like XT and MSXML cannot handle the DocBook XSL stylesheets, so these cannot be used for even the simplest HTML creation. Xalan works with DocBook XSL stylesheets, but the sources of the PHP manual currently exceed the limit of max. opened files.
FO processors:
PassiveTeX: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~rathz/passivetex/
FOP: http://xml.apache.org/fop/ (you need version 0.20.5rc2 or higher)