DocBook XSL Stylesheet Release Notes

DocBook Project Development Team

$Id: RELEASE-NOTES.xml,v 1.42 2005/08/11 23:27:13 xmldoc Exp $

2005-08-12


Table of Contents

Release 1.69.1
Release 1.69.0
Common
FO
Help
HTML
man
Release 1.68.1
Release 1.68.0
Release 1.67.2
Release 1.67.1
Release 1.67.0
Release 1.66.1
Release 1.65.0
Release 1.64.1
Release 1.61.0
Release 1.60.1
Release 1.59.2
Release 1.59.1
Release 1.58.0
Release 1.57.0
Release 1.56.0
Older releases
About dot-zero releases

These are the release notes for the DocBook XSL Stylesheets. At a minimum, this file attempts to document changes to the public APIs, particularly to user-configurable parameters. This file also provides a high-level overview of the features added in each release.

Bug fixes are (mostly) not documented here. For a complete list of changes, including descriptions of bug fixes, see the NEWS file, which is auto-generated from the checkin descriptions for changes in the project CVS repository.

Release 1.69.1

This release is a minor bug-fix update to the 1.69.0 release. Along with bug fixes, it includes one configuration-parameter change: The default value of the annotation.support parameter is now 0 (off). The reason for that change is that there have been reports that annotation handling is causing a significant performance degradation in processing of large documents with xsltproc.

Release 1.69.0

The release includes major feature changes, particularly in the manpages stylesheets, as well as a large number of bug fixes.

As with all DocBook Project “dot zero” releases, this is an experimental release .

Common

  • This release adds localizations for the following languages: Albanian, Amharic, Azerbaijani, Hindi, Irish (Gaelic), Gujarati, Kannada, Mongolian, Oriya, Punjabi, Tagalog, Tamil, and Welsh.

  • Added support for specifying number format for auto labels for chapter, appendix, part, and preface. Contolled with the appendix.autolabel, chapter.autolabel, part.autolabel, and preface.autolabel parameters.

  • Added basic support for biblioref cross referencing.

  • Added support for align on caption in mediaobject.

  • Added support for processing documents that use the DocBook V5 namespace.

  • Added support for termdef and mathphrase.

  • EXPERIMENTAL: Incorporated the Slides and Website stylesheets into the DocBook XSL stylesheets package. So, for example, Website documents can now be processed using the following URI for the driver Website tabular.xsl file:

    http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/website/tabular.xsl
  • A procedure without a title is now treated as an “informal” procedure (meaning that it is not added to any generated “list of procedures” and has no affect on numbering of generated labels for other procedures).

  • docname is no longer added to olink when pointing to a root element.

  • Added support for generation of choice separator in inline simplelist. This enables auto-generation of an appropriate localized “choice separator” (for example, “and” or “or”) before the final item in an inline simplelist.

    To indicate that you want a choice separator generated for a particular list, you need to put a processing instruction (PI) of the form <?dbchoice choice="foo"?> as a child of the list. For example:

      <para>Choose from
      ONE and ONLY ONE of the following: 
      <simplelist type="inline">
      <?dbchoice choice="or" ?>
      <member>A</member>
      <member>B</member>
      <member>C</member>.</simplelist></para>

    Output (for English):

    Choose from ONE and only ONE of the following choices: A, B, or C.

    As a temporary workaround for the fact that most of the DocBook non-English locale files don't have a localization for the word “or”, you can put in a literal string to be used; example for French: <?dbchoice choice="ou">. That is, use “ou” instead of “or”.

FO

  • Added content-type property to external-graphic element, based on imagedata format attribute.

  • Added support for generating <rx:meta-field creator="$VERSION"/> field for XEP output. This makes the DocBook XSL stylesheet version information available through the Document Properties menu in Acrobat Reader and other PDF viewers.

  • Trademark symbol handling made consistent with handling of same in HTML stylesheets. Prior to this change, if you processed a document that contained no value for the class attribute on the trademark element, the HTML stylesheets would default to rendering a superscript TM symbol after the trademark contents, but the FO stylesheets would render nothing.

  • Added support for generating XEP bookmarks for refentry.

  • Added support for HTML markup table border attribute, applied to each table cell.

  • The table.width template can now sum column specs if none use % or *.

  • Added fox:destination extension inside fox:outline to support linking to internal destinations.

  • Added support for customizing abstract with property sets. Controlled with the abstract.properties and abstract.title.properties parameters.

  • Add footnotes in table title to table footnote set, and add support for table footnotes to HTML table markup.

  • Added support for title in glosslist.

  • Added support for itemizedlist symbol none.

  • Implemented the new graphical.admonition.properties and nongraphical.admonition.properties attribute sets.

  • Added id to formalpara and some other blocks that were missing it.

  • Changed the anchor template to output fo:inline instead of fo:wrapper.

  • Added support for toc.max.depth parameter.

Help

  • Eclipse Help: Added support for generating olink database.

HTML

man

This release closes out 44 manpages stylesheet bug reports and feature requests. It adds more than 35 new configuration parameters for controlling aspects of man-page output -- including hyphenation and justification, handling of links, conversion of Unicode characters, and contents of man-page headers and footers.

  • New options for globally disabling/enabling hyphenation and justification: man.justify and man.hyphenate.

    Note that the default for the both of those is zero (off), because justified text looks good only when it is also hyphenated; to quote the “Hyphenation” node from the groff info page:

    Since the odds are not great for finding a set of words, for every output line, which fit nicely on a line without inserting excessive amounts of space between words, `gtroff' hyphenates words so that it can justify lines without inserting too much space between words.

    The problem is that groff can end up hyphenating a lot of things that you don't want hyphenated (variable names and command names, for example). Keeping both justification and hyphenation disabled ensures that hyphens won't get inserted where you don't want to them, and you don't end up with lines containing excessive amounts of space between words. These default settings run counter to how most existing man pages are formatted. But there are some notable exceptions, such as the perl man pages.

  • Added parameters for controlling hyphenation of computer inlines, filenames, and URLs. By default, even when hyphenation is enabled (globally), hyphenation is now suppressed for "computer inlines" (currently, just classname, constant, envar, errorcode, option, replaceable, userinput, type, and varname, and for filenames, and for URLs from link. It can be (re)enabled using the man.hyphenate.computer.inlines, man.hyphenate.filenames, and man.hyphenate.urls parameters.

  • Implemented a new system for replacing Unicode characters. There are two parts to the new system: a “string substitution map” for doing “essential” replacements, and a “character map” that can optionally be disabled and enabled.

    The new system fixes all open bugs that had to do with literal Unicode numbered entities such as &#8220; and &#8221; showing up in output, and greatly expands the ability of the stylesheets to generate “good” roff equivalents for Unicode symbols and special characters.

    Here are some details...

    The previous manpages mechanism for replacing Unicode symbols and special characters with roff equivalents (the replace-entities template) was not scalable and not complete. The mechanism handled a somewhat arbitrary selection of less than 20 or so Unicode characters. But there are potentially more than 800 Unicode special characters that have some groff equivalent they can be mapped to. And there are about 34 symbols in the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) block alone. Users might reasonably expect that if they include any of those Latin-1 characters in their DocBook source documents, they will get correctly converted to known roff equivalents in output.

    In addition to those common symbols, certain users may have a need to use symbols from other Unicode blocks. Say, somebody who is documenting an application related to math might need to use a bunch of symbols from the “Mathematical Operators” Unicode block (there are about 65 characters in that block that have reasonable roff equivalents). Or somebody else might really like Dingbats -- such as the checkmark character -- and so might use a bunch of things from the “Dingbat” block (141 characters in that that have roff equivalents or that can at least be “degraded” somewhat gracefully into roff).

    So, the old replace-entities mechanism was replaced with a completely different mechanism that is based on use of two “maps”: a “substitution map” and a “character map” (the latter in a format compliant with the XSLT 2.0 spec and therefore completely “forward compatible” with XSLT 2.0).

    The substitution map is controlled through the man.string.subst.map parameter, and is used to replace things like the backslash character (which needs special handling to prevent it from being interpreted as a roff escape). The substitution map cannot be disabled, because disabling it will cause the output to be broken. However, you can add to it and change it if needed.

    The “character map” mechanism, on the other hand, can be completely disabled. It is enabled by default, and, by default, does replacement of all Latin-1 symbols, along with most special spaces, dashes, and quotes (about 75 characters by default). Also, you can optionally enable a “full” character map that provides support for converting all 800 or so of the characters that have some reasonable groff equivalent.

    The character-map mechanism is controlled through the following parameters:

    man.charmap.enabled

    turns character-map support on/off

    man.charmap.use.subset

    specifies that a subset of the character map is used instead of the full map

    man.charmap.subset.profile

    specifies profile of character-map subset

    man.charmap.uri

    specifies an alternate character map to use instead of the “standard” character map provided in the distribution

  • Implemented out-of-line handling of display of URLs for links (currently, only for ulink). This gives you three choices for handling of links:

    1. Number and list links. Each link is numbered inline, with a number in square brackets preceding the link contents, and a numbered list of all links is added to the end of the document.

    2. Only list links. Links are not numbered, but an (unnumbered) list of links is added to the end of the document.

    3. Suppress links. Don't number links and don't add any list of links to the end of the document.

    You can also choose whether links should be underlined. The default is “the works” -- list, number, and underline links. You can use the man.links.list.enabled, man.links.are.numbered, and man.links.are.underlined parameters to change the defaults. The default heading for the link list is REFERENCES. You can be change that using the man.links.list.heading parameter.

  • Changed default output encoding to UTF-8. This does not mean that man pages are output in raw UTF-8, because the character map is applied before final output, causing all UTF-8 characters covered in the map to be converted to roff equivalents.

  • Added support for processing refsect3 and formalpara and nested refsection elements, down to any arbitrary level of nesting.

  • Output of the NAME and SYNOPSIS and AUTHOR headings and the headings for admonitions (note, caution, etc.) are no longer hard-coded for English. Instead, headings are generated for those in the correct locale (just as the FO and HTML stylesheets do).

  • Re-worked mechanism for assembling page headers/footers (the contents of the .TH macro “title line”).

    Here are some details...

    All man pages contain a .TH roff macro whose contents are used for rendering the “title line” displayed in the header and footer of each page. Here are a couple of examples of real-world man pages that have useful page headers/footers:

      gtk-options(7)    GTK+ User's Manual   gtk-options(7) <-- header
      GTK+ 1.2              2003-10-20       gtk-options(7) <-- footer
    
      svgalib(7)       Svgalib User Manual       svgalib(7) <-- header
      Svgalib 1.4.1      16 December 1999        svgalib(7) <-- footer

    And here are the terms with which the groff_man(7) man page refers to the various parts of the header/footer:

      title(section)  extra3  title(section)  <- header
      extra2          extra1  title(section)  <- footer

    Or, using the names with which the man(7) man page refers to those same fields:

      title(section)  manual  title(section)  <- page header
      source          date    title(section)  <- page footer

    The easiest way to control the contents of those fields is to mark up your refentry content like the following (note that this is a “minimal” example).

      <refentry>
        <info>
          <date>2003-10-20</date> 1
        </info>
        <refmeta>
          <refentrytitle>gtk-options</refentrytitle> 2
          <manvolnum>7</manvolnum> 3
          <refmiscinfo class="source-name">GTK+</refmiscinfo> 4
          <refmiscinfo class="version">1.2</refmiscinfo> 5
          <refmiscinfo class="manual">GTK+ User's Manual</refmiscinfo> 6
        </refmeta>
        <refnamediv>
          <refname>gtk-options</refname>
          <refpurpose>Standard Command Line Options for GTK+ Programs</refpurpose>
        </refnamediv>
        <refsect1>
          <title>Description</title>
          <para>This manual page describes the command line options, which
          are common to all GTK+ based applications.</para>
        </refsect1>
      </refentry>

    1

    Sets the “date” part of the header/footer.

    2

    Sets the “title” part.

    3

    Sets the “section” part.

    4

    Sets the “source name” part.

    5

    Sets the “version” part.

    6

    Sets the “manual” part.

    Below are explanations of the steps the stylesheets take to attempt to assemble and display “good” headers and footer. [In the descriptions, note that *info is the refentryinfo” child (whatever its name), and parentinfo is the “info” child of its parent (again, whatever its name).]

    extra1 field (date)

    Content of the “extra1” field is what shows up in the center footer position of each page. The man(7) man page describes it as “the date of the last revision”.

    To provide this content, if the refentry.date.profile.enabled is non-zero, the stylesheets check the value of refentry.date.profile.

    Otherwise, by default, they check for a date or pubdate not only in the *info contents, but also in the parentinfo contents.

    If a date cannot be found, the stylesheets now automatically generate a localized “long format” date, ensuring that this field always has content in output.

    However, if for some reason you want to suppress this field, you can do so by setting a non-zero value for man.th.extra1.suppress.

    extra2 field (source)

    On Linux systems and on systems with a modern groff, the content of the “extra2” field are what shows up in the left footer position of each page.

    The man(7) man page describes this as “the source of the command”, and provides the following examples:

    • For binaries, use somwething like: GNU, NET-2, SLS Distribution, MCC Distribution.

    • For system calls, use the version of the kernel that you are currently looking at: Linux 0.99.11.

    • For library calls, use the source of the function: GNU, BSD 4.3, Linux DLL 4.4.1.

    In practice, there are many pages that simply have a version number in the “source” field. So, it looks like what we have is a two-part field, Name Version, where:

    Name

    product name (e.g., BSD) or org. name (e.g., GNU)

    Version

    version name

    Each part is optional. If the Name is a product name, then the Version is probably the version of the product. Or there may be no Name, in which case, if there is a Version, it is probably the version of the item itself, not the product it is part of. Or, if the Name is an organization name, then there probably will be no Version.

    To provide this content, if the refentry.source.name.profile.enabled and refentry.version.profile.enabled parameter are non-zero, the stylesheets check the value of refentry.source.name.profile refentry.version.profile.

    Otherwise, by default, they check the following places, in the following order:

    1. *info/productnumber
    2. *info/productnumber
    3. refmeta/refmiscinfo[@class = 'version']
    4. parentinfo/productnumber
    5. *info/productname
    6. parentinfo/productname
    7. refmeta/refmiscinfo
    8. [nothing found, so leave it empty]

    extra3 field

    On Linux systems and on systems with a modern groff, the content of the “extra3” field are what shows up in the center header position of each page. Some man pages have “extra2” content, some don't. If a particular man page has it, it is most often “context” data about some larger system the documented item belongs to (for example, the name or description of a group of related applications). The stylesheets now check the following places, in the following order, to look for content to add to the “extra3” field.

    1. parentinfo/title
    2. parent's title
    3. refmeta/refmiscinfo
    4. [nothing found, so leave it empty]

  • Reworked *info gathering. For each refentry found, the stylesheets now cache its *info content, then check for any valid parent of it that might have metainfo content and cache that, if found; they then then do all further matches against those node-sets (rather than re-selecting the original *info nodes each time they are needed).

  • New option for breaking strings after forward slashes. This enables long URLs and pathnames to be broken across lines. Controlled through man.break.after.slash parameter.

  • Output for servicemark and trademark are now (SM) and (TM). There is a groff "\(tm" escape, but output from that is not acceptable.

  • New option for controlling the length of the title part of the .TH title line. Controlled through the man.th.title.max.length parameter.

  • New option for specifying output encoding of each man page; controlled with man.output.encoding (similar to the HTML chunker.output.encoding parameter).

  • New option for suppressing filename messages when generating output; controlled with man.output.quietly (similar to the HTML chunk.quietly parameter).

  • The text of cross-references to first-level refentry (refsect1, top-level refsection, refnamediv, and refsynopsisdiv) are now capitalized.

  • Cross-references to refnamediv now use the localized NAME title instead of using the first refname child. This makes the output inconsistent with HTML and FO output, but for man-page output, it seems to make better sense to have the NAME. (It may actually make better sense to do it that way in HTML and FO output as well...)

  • Added support for processing funcparams.

  • Removed the space that was being output between funcdef and paramdef; example: was: float rand (void); now: float rand(void)

  • Turned off bold formatting for the type element when it occurs within a funcdef or paramdef

  • Corrected rendering of simplelist. Any <simplelist type="inline" instance is now rendered as a comma-separated list (also with an optional localized “and” or “or” before the last item -- see description elsewhere in these release notes). Any simplelist instance whose type is not inline is rendered as a one-column vertical list (ignoring the values of the type and columns attributes if present)

  • Comment added at top of roff source for each page now includes DocBook XSL stylesheets version number (as in the HTML stylesheets)

  • Made change to prevent “sticky” fonts changes. Now, when the manpages stylesheets encounter node sets that need to be boldfaced or italicized, they put the \fBfoo\fR and \fIbar\fR groff bold/italic instructions separately around each node in the set.

  • synop.xsl: Boldface everything in funcsynopsis output except parameters (which are in ital). The man(7) man page says:

    For functions, the arguments are always specified using italics, even in the SYNOPSIS section, where the rest of the function is specified in bold.

    A look through the contents of the man/man2 directory shows that most (all) existing pages do follow this “everything in funcsynopsis bold” rule. That means the type content and any punctuation (parens, semicolons, varargs) also must be bolded.

  • Removed code for adding backslashes before periods/dots in roff source, because backslashes in front of periods/dots in roff source are needed only in the very rare case where a period is the very first character in a line, without any space in front of it. A better way to deal with that rare case is for you to add a zero-width space in front of the offending dot(s) in your source

  • Removed special handling of the quote element. That was hard-coded to cause anything marked up with the quote element to be output preceded by two backticks and followed by two apostrophes -- that is, that old-school kludge for generating “curly” quotes in Emacs and in X-Windows fonts. While Emacs still seems to support that, I don't think X-Windows has for a long time now. And, anyway, it looks (and has always looked) like crap when viewed on a normal tty/console. In addition, it breaks localiztion of quote. By default, quote content is output with localized quotation marks, which, depending on the locale, may or may not be left and right double quotation marks.

  • Changed mappings for left and right single quotation marks. Those had previously been incorrectly mapped to the backtick (&#96;) and apostrophe (&39;) characters (for kludgy reasons -- see above). They are now correctly mapped to the \(oq and \(cq roff escapes. If you want the old (broken) behavior, you need to manually change the mappings for those in the value of the man.string.subst.map parameter.

  • Removed xref.xsl file. Now, of the various cross-reference elements, only the ulink element is handled differently; the rest are handled exactly as the HTML stylesheets handle them, except that no hypertext links are generated. (Because there is no equivalent hypertext mechanism is man pages.)

  • New option for making “subheading dividers” in generated roff source. The dividers are not visible in the rendered man page; they are just there to make the source readable. Controlled using man.subheading.divider.

  • Fixed many places where too much space was being added between lines.

Release 1.68.1

The release adds localization support for Farsi (thanks to Sina Heshmati) and improved support for the XLink-based DocBook NG db:link element. Other than that, it is a minor bug-fix update to the 1.68.0 release. The main thing it fixes is a build error that caused the XSLT Java extensions to be jarred up with the wrong package structure. Thanks to Jens Stavnstrup for quickly reporting the problem, and to Mauritz Jeanson for investigating and finding the cause.

Release 1.68.0

This release includes some features changes, particularly for FO/PDF output, and a number of bug fixes.

FO

  • Moved footnote properties to attribute-sets.

  • Added support for side floats, margin notes, and custom floats.

  • Added new parameters body.start.indent and body.end.indent to the set.flow.properties template.

  • Added support for xml:id

  • Added support for refdescriptor.

  • Added support for multiple refnamedivs.

  • Added index.entry.properties attribute-set to support customization of index entries.

  • Added set.flow.properties template call to each fo:flow to support customizations entry point.

  • Add support for @floatstyle in figure

  • Moved hardcoded properties for index division titles to the index.div.title.properties attribute-set.

  • Added support for table-layout="auto" for XEP.

  • Added index.div.title.properties attribute-set.

  • $verbose parameter is now passed to most elements.

  • Added refentry to toc in part, as it is permitted by the DocBook schema/DTD.

  • Added backmatter elements and article to toc in part, since they are permitted by the DocBook schema/DTD.

  • Added mode="toc" for simplesect, since it is now permitted in the toc if simplesect.in.toc is set.

  • Moved hard-coded properties to nongraphical.admonintion.properties and graphical.admonition.properties attribute sets.

  • Added support for sidebar-width and float-type processing instructions in sidebar.

  • For tables with HTML markup elements, added support for dbfo bgcolor PI, the attribute-sets named table.properties, informaltable.properties, table.table.properties, and table.cell.padding. Also added support for the templates named table.cell.properties and table.cell.block.properties so that tabstyles can be implemented. Also added support for tables containing only tr instead of tbody with tr.

  • Added new paramater hyphenate.verbatim.characters which can specify characters after which a line break can occur in verbatim environments. This parameter can be used to extend the initial set of characters which contain only space and non-breakable space.

  • Added itemizedlist.label.markup to enable selection of different bullet symbol. Also added several potential bullet characters, commented out by default.

  • Enabled all id's in XEP output for external olinking.

HTML

Images

  • Added new SVG admonition graphics and navigation images.

Release 1.67.2

This release fixes a table bug introduced in the 1.67.1 release.

Release 1.67.1

This release includes a number of bug fixes; for details, see the WhatsNew file.

The following lists provide details about API and feature changes.

FO

  • Tables: Inherited cell properties are now passed to the table.cell.properties template so they can be overridden by a customization.

  • Tables: Added support for bgcolor PI on table row element.

  • TOCs: Added new parameter simplesect.in.toc; default value of 0 causes simplesect to be omitted from TOCs; to cause simplesect to be included in TOCs, you must set the value of simplesect.in.toc to 1.Comment from Norm:

    Simplesect elements aren't supposed to appear in the ToC at all... The use case for simplesect is when, for example, every chapter in a book ends with "Exercises" or "For More Information" sections and you don't want those to appear in the ToC.

  • Sections: Reverted change that caused a variable reference to be used in a template match and rewrote code to preserve intended semantics.

  • Lists: Added workaround to prevent "* 0.60 + 1em" garbage in list output from PassiveTeX

  • Moved the literal attributes from component.title to the component.title.properties attribute-set so they can be customized.

  • Lists: Added glossdef's first para to special handling in fo:list-item-body.

HTML

HTML Help

  • Added support for generating windows-1252-encoded output using Saxon; for more details, see the list of XSL Java extensions changes for this release.

man pages

  • Replaced named/numeric character-entity references for non-breaking space with groff equivalent (backslash-tilde).

XSL Java extensions

  • Saxon extensions: Added the Windows1252 class. It extends Saxon 6.5.x with the windows-1252 character set, which is particularly useful when generating HTML Help for Western European Languages (code from Pontus Haglund and contributed to the DocBook community by Sectra AB, Sweden).

    To use:

    1. Make sure that the Saxon 6.5.x jar file and the jar file for the DocBook XSL Java extensions are in your CLASSPATH

    2. Create a DocBook XSL customization layer -- a file named mystylesheet.xsl or whatever -- that, at a minimum, contains the following:

        <xsl:stylesheet
          xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
          version='1.0'>
          <xsl:import href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/htmlhelp/htmlhelp.xsl"/>
          <xsl:output method="html" encoding="WINDOWS-1252" indent="no"/>
          <xsl:param name="htmlhelp.encoding" select="'WINDOWS-1252'"></xsl:param>
          <xsl:param name="chunker.output.encoding" select="'WINDOWS-1252'"></xsl:param>
          <xsl:param name="saxon.character.representation" select="'native'"></xsl:param>
        </xsl:stylesheet>

      Invoke Saxon with the encoding.windows-1252 Java system property set to com.nwalsh.saxon.Windows1252; for example

        java \
          -Dencoding.windows-1252=com.nwalsh.saxon.Windows1252 \
        com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet \
        mydoc.xml mystylesheet.xsl

      Or, for a more complete "real world" case showing other options you'll typically want to use:

        java \
          -Dencoding.windows-1252=com.nwalsh.saxon.Windows1252 \
          -Djavax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl \
          -Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=org.apache.xerces.jaxp.SAXParserFactoryImpl \
          -Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.icl.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl \
        com.icl.saxon.StyleSheet \
          -x org.apache.xml.resolver.tools.ResolvingXMLReader \
          -y org.apache.xml.resolver.tools.ResolvingXMLReader \
          -r org.apache.xml.resolver.tools.CatalogResolver \
        mydoc.xml mystylesheet.xsl

      In both cases, the "mystylesheet.xsl" file should be a DocBook customization layer containing the parameters show in step 2.

  • Saxon extensions: Removed Saxon 8 extensions from release package

Release 1.67.0

  • A number of important bug fixes, documented in WhatsNew.

  • Added Saxon8 extensions

  • Enabled dbfo table-width on entrytbl in FO output

  • Added support for role=strong on emphasis in FO output

  • Added new FO parameter hyphenate.verbatim that can be used to turn on "intelligent" wrapping of verbatim environments.

  • Replaced all <tt></tt> output with <code></code>

  • Changed admon.graphic.width template to a mode so that different admonitions can have different graphical widths.

  • Deprecated the HTML shade.verbatim parameter (use CSS instead)

  • Wrapped ToC refentrytitle/refname and refpurpose in span with class values. This makes it possible to style them using a CSS stylesheet.

  • Use strong/em instead of b/i in HTML output

  • Added support for converting Emphasis to groff italic and Emphasis role='bold' to bold. Controlled by emphasis.propagates.style param, but not documented yet using litprog system. Will do that next (planning to add some other parameter-controllable options for hyphenation and handling of line spacing).

  • callout.graphics.number.limit.xml param: Changed the default from 10 to 15.

  • verbatim.properties: Added hyphenate=false

  • Saxon and Xalan Text.java extensions: Added support for URIResolver() on insertfile href's

  • Added generated RELEASE-NOTES.txt file.

  • Added INSTALL file (executable file for generating catalog.xml)

  • Removed obsolete tools directory from package

Release 1.66.1

  • A number of important bug fixes, documented in WhatsNew.

  • Now xml:base attributes that are generated by an XInclude processor are resolved for image files.

  • Rewrote olink templates to support several new features.

  • Added index.on.type parameter for new type attribute introduced in DocBook 4.3 for indexterms and index. This allows you to create multiple indices containing different categories of entries. For users of 4.2 and earlier, you can use the new parameter index.on.role instead.

  • Added new section.autolabel.max.depth parameter to turn off section numbering below a certain depth. This permits you to number major section levels and leave minor section levels unnumbered.

  • Added footnote.sep.leader.properties attribute set to format the line separating footnotes in printed output.

  • Added parameter img.src.path as a prefix to HTML img src attributes. The prefix is added to whatever path is already generated by the stylesheet for each image file.

  • Added new attribute-sets informalequation.properties, informalexample.properties, informalfigure.properties, and informaltable.properties, so each such element type can be formatted individually if needed.

  • Add component.label.includes.part.label parameter to add any part number to chapter, appendix and other component labels when the label.from.part parameter is nonzero. This permits you to distinguish multiple chapters with the same chapter number in cross references and the TOC.

  • Added chunk.separate.lots parameter for HTML output. This parameter lets you generate separate chunk files for each LOT (list of tables, list of figures, etc.).

  • Added several table features:

    • Added table.table.properties attribute set to add properties to the fo:table element.

    • Added placeholder templates named table.cell.properties and table.cell.block.properties to enable adding properties to any fo:table-cell or the cell's fo:block, respectively. These templates are a start for implementing table styles.

  • Added new attribute set component.title.properties for easy modifications of component's title formatting in FO output.

  • Added Saxon support for an encoding attribute on the textdata element. Added new parameter textdata.default.encoding which specifies encoding when encoding attribute on textdata is missing.

  • Template label.this.section now controls whole section label, not only sub-label which corresponds to particular label. Former behaviour was IMHO bug as it was not usable.

  • Formatting in titleabbrev for TOC and headers is preserved when there are no hotlink elements in the title. Formerly the title showed only the text of the title, no font changes or other markup.

  • Added intial.page.number template to set the initial-page-number property for page sequences in print output. Customizing this template lets you change when page numbering restarts. This is similar to the format.page.number template that lets you change how the page number formatting changes in the output.

  • Added force.page.count template to set the force-page-count property for page sequences in print output. This is similar to the format.page.number template.

  • Sort language for localized index sorting in autoidx-ng.xsl is now taken from document lang, not from system environment.

  • Numbering and formatting of normal and ulink footnotes (if turned on) has been unified. Now ulink footnotes are mixed in with any other footnotes.

  • Added support for renderas attribute in section and sect1 et al. This permits you to render a given section title as if it were a different level.

  • Added support for label attribute in footnote to manually supply the footnote mark.

  • Added support for DocBook 4.3 corpcredit element.

  • Added support for a dbfo keep-together PI for formal objects (table, figure, example, equation, programlisting). That permits a formal object to be kept together if it is not already, or to be broken if it is very long and the default keep-together is not appropriate.

  • For graphics files, made file extension matching case insensitive, and updated the list of graphics extensions.

  • Allow calloutlist to have block content before the first callout

  • Added dbfo-need processing instruction to provide soft page breaks.

  • Added implementation of existing but unused default.image.width parameter for graphics.

  • Support DocBook NG tag inline element.

  • It appears that XEP now supports Unicode characters in bookmarks. There is no further need to strip accents from characters.

  • Make segmentedlist HTML markup more semantic and available to CSS styles.

  • Added user.preroot placeholder template to permit xsl-stylesheet and other PIs and comments to be output before the HTML root element.

  • Non-chunked legalnotice now gets an <a name="id"> element in HTML output so it can be referenced with xref or link.

  • In chunked HTML output, changed link rel="home" to rel="start", and link rel="previous" to rel="prev", per W3C HTML 4.01 spec.

  • Added several patches to htmlhelp from W. Borgert

  • Added Bosnian locale file as common/bs.xml.

Release 1.65.0

  • A number of important bug fixes, documented in WhatsNew.

  • Added a workaround to allow these stylesheets to process DocBook NG documents. (It’s a hack that pre-processes the document to strip off the namespace and then uses exsl:node-set to process the result.)

  • Added alternative indexing mechanism which has better internationalization support. New indexing method allows grouping of accented letters like e, é, ë into the same group under letter "e". It can also treat special letters (e.g. "ch") as one character and place them in the correct position (e.g. between "h" and "i" in Czech language).

    In order to use this mechanism you must create customization layer which imports some base stylesheet (like fo/docbook.xsl, html/chunk.xsl) and then includes appropriate stylesheet with new indexing code (fo/autoidx-ng.xsl or html/autoidx-ng.xsl). For example:

    <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                    version="1.0">
    
    <xsl:import href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/fo/docbook.xsl"/>
    <xsl:include href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/fo/autoidx-ng.xsl"/>
    
    </xsl:stylesheet>

    New method is known to work with Saxon and it should also work with xsltproc 1.1.1 and later. Currently supported languages are English, Czech, German, French, Spanish and Danish.

Release 1.64.1

General bug fixes and improvements. Sorry about the failure to produce an updated release notes file for 1.62.0—1.63.2

  • In the course of fixing bug #849787, wrapping Unicode callouts with an appropriate font change in the Xalan extensions, I discovered that the Xalan APIs have changed a bit. So xalan2.jar will work with older Xalan 2 implementations, xalan25.jar works with Xalan 2.5.

Release 1.61.0

Lots of bug fixes and improvements.

  • Initial support for timestamp PI. From now you can use <?dbtimestamp format="Y-m-d H:M:S"?> to get current datetime in your document. Added localization support for datetime PI

  • Added level 6 to test for section depth in section.level template so that section.title.level6.properties will be used for sections that are 6 deep or deeper. This should also cause a h6 to be created in html output.

  • Don't use SVG graphics if use.svg=0

  • Now uses number-and-title-template for sections only if section.autolabel is not zero.

  • Added missing 'english-language-name' attribute to the l10n element, and the missing 'style' attribute to the template element so the current gentext documents will validate.

  • Corrected several references to parameter qanda.defaultlabel that were missing the "$".

  • Now accepts admon.textlabel parameter to turn off Note, Warning, etc. label.

  • FeatReq #684561: support more XEP metadata

  • Added hyphenation support. Added support for coref. Added beginpage support. (does nothing; see TDG).

  • Added support for hyphenation-character, hyphenation-push-character-count, and hyphenation-remain-character-count

  • Added root.properties, ebnf.assignment, and ebnf.statement.terminator

  • Support bgcolor PI in table cells; make sure rowsep and colsep don't have any effect on the last row or column

  • Handle othercredit on titlepage a little better

  • Applied fix from Jeff Beal that fixed the bug that put secondary page numbers on primary entries. Same with tertiary page numbers on secondary entries.

  • Added definition of missing variable collection.

  • Make footnote formatting 'normal' even when it occurs in a context that has special formatting

  • Added warning when glossary.collection is not blank, but it cannot open the specified file.

  • Pick up the frame attribute on table and informaltable.

  • indexdiv/title in non-autogenerated indexes are now picked up.

  • Removed (unused) component.title.properties

  • Move IDs from page-sequences down to titlepage blocks

  • Use proportional-column-width(1) on more tables.

    Use proportional-column-width() for header/footer tables; suppress relative-align when when using FOP

  • Check for glossterm.auto.link when linking firstterms; don't output gl. prefix on glossterm links

  • Generate Part ToCs

  • Support glossary, bibliography, and index in component ToCs.

  • Refactored chunking code so that customization of chunk algorithm and chunk elements is more practical

  • Support textobject/phrase on inlinemediaobject.

  • Support 'start' PI on ordered lists

  • Fixed test of $toc PI to turn on qandaset TOC.

  • Added process.chunk.footnotes to sect2 through 5 to fix bug of missing footnotes when chunk level greater than 1.

  • Added paramater toc.max.depth which controls maximal depth of ToC as requested by PHP-DOC group.

  • Exempted titleabbrev from preamble processing in lists, and fixed variablelist preamble code to use the same syntax as the other lists.

  • Added support for elements between variablelist and first varlistentry since DocBook 4.2 supports that now.

Release 1.60.1

Lots of bug fixes.

  • The format of the titlepage.templates.xml files and the stylesheet that transforms them have been significantly changed. All of the attributes used to control the templates are now namespace qualified. So what used to be:

    <t:titlepage element="article" wrapper="fo:block">

    is now:

    <t:titlepage t:element="article" t:wrapper="fo:block">

    Attributes from other namespaces (including those that are unqualified) are now copied directly through. In practice, this means that the names that used to be “fo:” qualified:

    <title named-template="component.title"
           param:node="ancestor-or-self::article[1]"
           fo:text-align="center"
           fo:keep-with-next="always"
           fo:font-size="&hsize5;"
           fo:font-weight="bold"
           fo:font-family="{$title.font.family}"/>

    are now unqualified:

    <title t:named-template="component.title"
           param:node="ancestor-or-self::article[1]"
           text-align="center"
           keep-with-next="always"
           font-size="&hsize5;"
           font-weight="bold"
           font-family="{$title.font.family}"/>

    The t:titlepage and t:titlepage-content elements both generate wrappers now. And unqualified attributes on those elements are passed through. This means that you can now make the title font apply to ane entire titlepage and make the entire “recto” titlepage centered by specifying the font and alignment on the those elements:

    <t:titlepage t:element="article" t:wrapper="fo:block"
                 font-family="{$title.font.family}">
    
      <t:titlepage-content t:side="recto"
                 text-align="center">
  • Support use of titleabbrev in running headers and footers.

  • Added (experimental) xref.with.number.and.title parameter to enable number/title cross references even when the default would be just the number.

  • Generate part ToCs if they're requested.

  • Use proportional-column-width() in header/footer tables.

  • Handle alignment correctly when screenshot wraps a graphic in a figure.

  • Format chapter and appendix cross references consistently.

  • Attempt to support tables with multiple tgroups in FO.

  • Output fo:table-columns in simplelist tables.

  • Use titlepage.templates.xml for indexdiv and glossdiv formatting.

  • Improve support for new bibliography elements.

  • Added footnote.number.format, table.footnote.number.format, footnote.number.symbols, and table.footnote.number.symbols for better control of footnote markers.

  • Added glossentry.show.acronyms.

  • Suppress the draft-mode page masters when draft-mode is “no”.

  • Make blank pages verso not recto. D'Oh!

  • Improved formatting of ulink footnotes.

  • Fixed bugs in graphic width/height calculations.

  • Added class attributes to inline elements.

  • Don't add “.html” to the filenames identified with the “dbhtml” PI.

  • Don't force a ToC when sections contain refentrys.

  • Make section title sizes a function of the body.master.size.

Release 1.59.2

The 1.59.2 fixes an FO bug in the page masters that causes FOP to fail.

  • Removed the region-name from the region-body of blank pages. There's no reason to give the body of blank pages a unique name and doing so causes a mismatch that FOP detects.

  • Output IDs for the first paragraphs in listitems.

  • Fixed some small bugs in the handling of page numbers in double-sided mode.

  • Attempt to prevent duplicated IDs from being produced when endterm on xref points to something with nested structure.

  • Fix aligment problems in equations.

  • Output the type attribute on unordered lists (UL) in HTML only if the css.decoration parameter is true.

  • Calculate the font size in formal.title.properties so that it's 1.2 times the base font size, not a fixed "12pt".

Release 1.59.1

The 1.59.1 fixes a few bugs.

  • Added Bulgarian localization.

  • Indexing improvements; localize book indexes to books but allow setindex to index an entire set.

  • The default value for rowsep and colsep is now "1" as per CALS.

  • Added support for titleabbrev (use them for cross references).

  • Improvements to mediaobject for selecting print vs. online images.

  • Added seperate property sets for figures, examples, equations, tabless, and procedures.

  • Make lineannotations italic.

  • Support xrefstyle attribute.

  • Make endterm on xref higher priority than xreflabel target.

  • Glossary formatting improvements.

Release 1.58.0

The 1.58.0 adds some initial support for extensions in xsltproc, adds a few features, and fixes bugs.

  • This release contains the first attempt at extension support for xsltproc. The only extension available to date is the one that adjusts table column widths. Run extensions/xsltproc/python/xslt.py.

  • Fixed bugs in calculation of adjusted column widths to correct for rounding errors.

  • Support nested refsection elements correctly.

  • Reworked gentext.template to take context into consideration. The name of elements in localization files is now an xpath-like context list, not just a simple name.

  • Made some improvements to bibliography formatting.

  • Improved graphical formatting of admonitions.

  • Added support for entrytbl.

  • Support spanning index terms.

  • Support bibliosource.

Release 1.57.0

  • The 1.57.0 release wasn't documented here. Oops.

Release 1.56.0

The 1.56.0 release fixes bugs.

  • Reworked chunking. This will break all existing customizations layers that change the chunking algorithm. If you're customizing chunking, look at the new “content” parameter that's passed to process-chunk-element and friends.

  • Support continued and inherited numeration in orderedlist formatting for FOs.

  • Added Thai localization.

  • Tweaked stylesheet documentation stylesheets to link to TDG and the parameter references.

  • Allow title on tables of contents ("Table of Contents") to be optional. Added new keyword to generate.toc. Support tables of contents on sections.

  • Made separate parameters for table borders and table cell borders: table.frame.border.color, table.frame.border.style, table.frame.border.thickness, table.cell.border.color, table.cell.border.style, and table.cell.border.thickness.

  • Suppress formatting of “endofrangeindexterms. This is only half-right. They should generate a range, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

  • Support revdescription. (Bug #582192)

  • Added default.float.class and fixed figure floats. (Bug #497603)

  • Fixed formatting of sbr in FOs.

  • Added context to the “missing template” error message.

  • Process arg correctly in a group. (Bug #605150)

  • Removed 'keep-with-next' from formal.title.properties attribute set now that the stylesheets support the option of putting such titles below the object. Now the $placement value determines if 'keep-with-next' or 'keep-with-previous' is used in the title block.

  • Wrap “url()” around external-destinations when appropriate.

  • Fixed typo in compact list spacing. (Bug #615464)

  • Removed spurious hash in anchor name. (Bug #617717)

  • Address is now displayed verbatim on title pages. (Bug #618600)

  • The bridgehead.in.toc parameter is now properly supported.

  • Improved effectiveness of HTML cleanup by increasing the number of places where it is used. Improve use of HTML cleanup in XHTML stylesheets.

  • Support table of contents for appendix in article. (Bug #596599)

  • Don't duplicate footnotes in bibliographys and glossarys. (Bug #583282)

  • Added default.image.width. (Bug #516859)

  • Totally reworked funcsynopsis code; it now supports a 'tabular' presentation style for 'wide' prototypes; see funcsynopsis.tabular.threshold. (HTML only right now, I think, FO support, uh, real soon now.)

  • Reworked support for difference marking; toned down the colors a bit and added a “system.head.content” template so that the diff CSS wasn't overriding “user.head.content”. (Bug #610660)

  • Added call to the “*.head.content” elements when writing out long description chunks.

  • Make sure legalnotice link is correct even when chunking to a different base.dir.

  • Use CSS to set viewport characteristics if css.decoration is non-zero, use div instead of p for making graphic a block element; make figure titles the default alt text for images in a figure.

  • Added space-after to list.block.spacing.

  • Reworked section.level template to give “correct” answer instead of being off by one.

  • When processing tables, use the tabstyle attribute as the division class.

  • Fixed bug in html2xhtml.xsl that was causing the XHTML chunker to output HTML instead of XHTML.

Older releases

To view the release notes for older releases, see http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/docbook/xsl/RELEASE-NOTES.xml. Be aware that there were no release notes for releases prior to the 1.50.0 release.

About dot-zero releases

DocBook Project “dot zero” releases should be considered experimental and are always followed by stable “dot one” releases, usually within two or three weeks. Please help to ensure the stability of “dot one” releases by carefully testing each “dot zero” release and reporting back about any problems you find.

It is not recommended that you use a “dot zero” release in a production system, or package it for an OS distro. Instead, you should wait for the “dot one” version.