Instead of generating an HTML hyper-document it is somethimes necessary to produce a nicely printable copy. Therefore, starting from the same DocBook XML source document and using an alternative XSLT style sheet one can generate XSL-FO formatting objects, that can the be translated into various media formats, in particular PDF with oneof several XSL-FO to PDF translators.

At CERN a script, docbook2pdf, hides the details of this translation process from the user. By default the script takes one argument, the name of the XML source to be transformed into PDF, for example,

$ docbookpdf dbfile.xml
docbook2pdf dbfile.xml
dbfile.xml abc.xsl dbfile.fo
 
 Using java 1.4 from AFS.
 
java version "1.4.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.0-b92)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.0-b92, mixed mode)

Making portrait pages on A4 paper (210mmx297mm)
 
 running pdftex/passivetex (twice): pdfxmltex dbfile.fo
 
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-pre-1.0-unofficial-20010704 (Web2C 7.3.3.1)
(./dbfile.fo{/afs/cern.ch/sw/TeXlive/tl7/texmf-var/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg}
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
...
Output written on dbfile.pdf (1 page, 7710 bytes).
Transcript written on dbfile.log.

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159-pre-1.0-unofficial-20010704 (Web2C 7.3.3.1)
(./dbfile.fo{/afs/cern.ch/sw/TeXlive/tl7/texmf-var/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg}
...
Output written on dbfile.pdf (1 page, 7710 bytes).
Transcript written on dbfile.log.

In the above we see that first a XSLT translator (saxon) is run that generates XSL-FO elements, that are then rendered into PDF by pdftex, a variant of the TeX program that generates PDF. Thus we obtain a file dbfile.pdf, which can be seen in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. PDF rendering of a small DocBook test file

The file dbfile.pdf can be viewed with ghostview or acroread, and can be sent by these applications to a PostSCript printer.

What we obtained with the previous example is the default presentation as defined by the style sheets of Norman Walsh. In fact, Norman parameterized his style sheets in a convenient way, so that over one hundred parameters are available to finetune the format of the output page. At CERN you can specify a second filename to the docbook2pdf command, and when specified, it will be used as an XSLT customization style sheet, for instance, at CERN you could type:

$ docbookpdf dbfile.xml dbforpassivetex.xsl

If you are interested in such customization, you can start from the style sheet dbforpassivetex.xsl that is available from the docbook DocBook Web page at CERN. A full discussion of all parameters can be found in the [reference guide] entry in the [DocBook XSLT stylesheets] section of the above Web page.