Documentation

“The source for documentation.”

DocBook

TDG cover artDocBook 5: The Definitive Guide is published by O'Reilly Media and XML Press. The latest version, documenting the DocBook 5.2 tag set and semantics is available online.

The previous edition of the book covered both SGML and XML and was aimed at the DocBook V3.x and DocBook V4.x schemas. It's no longer being actively developed, and has gone out of print, but it is still available online.

Documentation for older releases and several customizations is also available on https://tdg.docbook.org/.

xslTNG Stylesheets

TNG cover artThe DocBook xslTNG Reference is a complete reference to the modern, XSLT 3.0 stylesheets for DocBook.

This reference documents all of the parameters, modes, and templates used in the stylesheets. It also provides guidance on how to use the advanced features of the stylesheets.

XSLT 1.0 stylesheets

XSL cover artDocBook XSL: The Complete Guide by Bob Stayton and published by Sagehill Enterprises is the definitive guide to using the DocBook XSL 1.0 stylesheets. It provides the necessary documentation to realize the full potential of DocBook publishing. It covers all aspects of DocBook publishing tools, including installing, using, and customizing the stylesheets and processing tools.

Modular DocBook DSSSL stylesheets

Before there was XSLT, there was DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language). The documentation for those stylesheets is online. In 2026, the toolchain still runs on some Linux distributions, but it hasn’t seen active development in a couple of decades. The documentation here was taken from the Debian distribution’s docbook-dsssl-doc package version 1.79-7. (Norm was going to try to fix some of the links; he spent an hour or so trying to get the build working, but was unsuccessful.)

Wiki

A DocBook wiki is also available. It contains a mixture of pages covering a wide range of schemas and tools. It’s not curated very actively these days and is probably quite out-of-date in some respects.

Other documents

For a time, these documents were hosted on documents.docbook.org which is now defunct.

Transclusion

“Transclusion” describes the process by which one document incorporates another by reference. In XML, this is most commonly done with XInclude. The presence of IDs and ID/IDREF links in an XML document complicates the transclusion process. Transcluding a document or fragment (for example, a warning or procedure) more than once may introduce multiple elements with the same ID. That, in turn, makes IDREF links to those IDs more complicated.

The transclusion specification describes a relatively light-weight mechanism by which a document author can automatically transform IDs and IDREFs to resolve duplicate IDs and clarify the linking relationships.

DocBook Transclusion

The syntax, semantics, and processing model for the DocBook transclusion mechanism.

Requirements for transclusion in DocBook

A summary of uses-cases for transclusion of content in DocBook documents.

ISO 690 Bibliographies

Evidence suggests that Jana Dvořáková published a description of how to use DocBook to produce ISO 690 bibliographies. It was lost from the wiki sometime circa 2012, it’s been recovered here as Bibliography acorrding to ISO 690 and ISO 690-2 standards.