Projects / DocBook Doclet

DocBook Doclet

DocBook Doclet creates DocBook XML and class diagrams from Javadoc comments, converts HTML to DocBook, and transfoms DocBook XML into various output formats. It consists of a complete DocBook distribution containing schemas and the DocBook XSL stylesheets. It also integrates Apache FOP as the XSL:FO processor. A Swing application is used to customize the doclet and most of the DocBook XSL parameters and to start the transformations.

Tags	Software Development Documentation Text Processing Markup XML DocBook
Licenses	Freeware
Implementation	Java

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Recent releases

6.1.0-644

23 Apr 2013 15:40

Release Notes: This is a maintanance release with many bugfixes.

6.0.3

05 Nov 2011 11:07

Release Notes: This release adds the parameter -useexternalfile=true to the javadoc ant task (CreateProcess error=206), fixes a jar version conflict in dbdoclet.jar (InvocationTargetException), and fixes path generation for dbdoclet projects.

6.0.2

31 Oct 2011 22:09

Release Notes: Bugfixes and GUI improvements.

6.0.1

18 Jun 2011 11:00

Release Notes: Generation of EPUB files was fixed, and images can now be embedded into the EPUB zip archive. Generation of JavaHelp was fixed. Relative referenced image files are incorporated into the base directory of HTML, JavaHelp and Eclipse Help. RTF and man pages are now supported. The generate.toc parameter is now supported, and the generation of ToC/LoTs is now configured using a special dialog. Customization files are now versioned. An upgrade was made to fop 1.0 and docbook-xsl 1.76.1. Support for Java 5 was discontinued.

5.2.6

18 Apr 2011 13:55

Release Notes: Autodetection of system fonts was added for generation via XSL:FO. The last project is automatically reopened during startup.

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Recent comments

06 Sep 2002 01:15

xmldoc

Important tool with some current limitations

This is an important addition to the DocBook
toolchain -- at least as important for its ability to
do "standalone" HTML->DocBook conversion as it is for
its ability to produce DocBook from Java source
documentation. And as far as I know there are no other
open-source tools available for converting HTML to
DocBook.

As of the 0.29 release, however, I think you can't yet
expect it to always produce valid DocBook that doesn't
require some manual cleanup (though it does always generate
clean well-formed XML -- nicely indented even).

The validity limitations I've seen relate mostly to
the fact that HTML permit certain kinds of markup
instances that really aren't complete, though they are
valid against the HTML DTD. When these markup instances get
converted to DocBook, which does require more complete
structures, they may not be valid.

For, example, in HTML, it's valid for a definition
list (dl element) to contain only a term (dt) with no
corresponding description (dd). But the DocBook Doclet
will convert that to a Variablelist containing a Term
but no associated Listitem (the equivalent of dd). This
generates validity errors because the Variablelist
content model requires a Listitem.

But validity errors like that are fairly easy to
find and clean up manually, so it's not that big of a
limitation. For future releases, it would be very
useful to have some logic in DocBook Doclet to detect
and automatically correct certain instances like that,
so that they don't need to be corrected manually.