DocBook Version 5.1b2 and DocBook-XSL Version 1.76.0 released

On 27th August 2010 DocBook version 5.1b2 and DocBook-XSL version 1.76.0 was released. DocBook V5.1b2 is the second test release of DocBook V5.1. Version 5.1b2 is available in RELAX NG and non-normatively in DTD and W3C XML Schema formats.

Summary of Changes in DocBook V5.1
The largest change is the introduction of support for topic-based authoring through the addition of the topic element and the assembly structure. For more information about assemblies, see DocBook Assemblies.

DocBook V5.1 also addresses the following requests for enhancement:

• RFE 1679665 Add better support for modular documentation
• RFE 1722935 Add a proofreader value to the class attribute for othercredit
• RFE 1770787 Add givenname as an alternative for firstname
• RFE 1899655 Allow more elements to be the root of a DocBook document
• RFE 2100736 Allow constant in initializer
• RFE 2791288 Added several additional elements, including quote, to the ubiquitous inlines
• RFE 2820190 Add a topic element
• RFE 2821653 Remove the constraint that indexterm elements must not appear in footnotes
• RFE 2907124 Allow personal name components directly in bibliomset.
• RFE 2907125 Allow all inlines in remark
• RFE 2907131 Allow simplesect in colophon
• RFE 2964576 Fix the bug that allowed table to appear inside entry

Element References can be found at DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide - Element Reference

DocBook-XSL Release Notes: 1.76.0

This release includes important bug fixes and adds the following significant feature changes:

• Gentext: Many updates and additions to translation/locales thanks to Red Hat, the Fedora Project, and other contributors.
• Common: Faster localization support, as language files are loaded on demand.
• FO: Support for SVG content in imagedata added.
• HTML: Output improved when using 'make.clean.html' and a stock CSS file is now provided.
• EPUB: A number of improvements to NCX, cover and image selection, and XHTML 1.1 element choices

DocBook WebHelp Project

DocBook WebHelp was the project I worked on for the Google Summer of Code 2010 program. Pencil down date for it was on 16th August, 2010, which means the Coding officially finished on that day. So, I with my mentor David Cramer finished all the requirements planned, and wrote all the documentation needed. Results was announced today, 21st August by Google Open Source Program team; I successfully finished the project :)

The demo of the output produced by WebHelp XSL customization is available on following link. The demo shown is the documentation of DocBook WebHelp.
http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/webhelp/docs/ch01.html
http://www.thingbag.net/docbook/gsoc2010/doc/content/ch01.html

The latest output in the snapshots have lot more features and looks quite beautiful compared to the released version. Do have a look -
http://snapshots.docbook.org/xsl/webhelp/docs/index.html
http://vulture.gentoo.org/~kasun/docbook/docbook-webhelp-snapshot-current/content/ch01.html

WebHelp Output

WebHelp Search tab

You can download DocBook installation from,
http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/

The Webhelp customization is available under, docbook-xsl-ns-1.76.1/webhelp. Following is some brief details about the DocBook WebHelp customization.

A common requirement for technical publications groups is to produce a Web-based help format that includes a table of contents pane, a search feature, and an index similar to what you get from the Microsoft HTML Help (.chm) format or Eclipse help. If the content is help for a Web application that is not exposed to the Internet or requires that the user be logged in, then it is impossible to use services like Google to add search.

DocBook WebHelp provides a browser-independent, platform-independent documentation “Web Help” output format for DocBook files. WebHelp provides a sophisticated but inexpensive web publishing option for DocBook.

Features

• Full text search.
• Stemming support for English, French, and German. Stemming support can be added for other languages by implementing a stemmer.

• Support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean using code from the Lucene search engine.
• Search highlighting shows where the searched for term appears in the results. Use the H button to toggle the highlighting on and off.
• Search results can include brief descriptions of the target.

• Table of Contents (TOC) pane with collapsible toc tree.

• Autosynchronization of content pane and TOC.
• TOC and search pane implemented without the use of a frameset.
• An Ant build.xml file to generate output. You can use this build file by importing it into your own or use it as a model for integrating this output format into your own build system.

So, what do you think of the output? Are you interested to give it a try?

Follow up of my posts related to DocBook WebHelp are here
Follow up of my posts related to DocBook are here

PS: For discussions, please subscribe to my comment feed such that you won't miss my replies. Alternatively contact us via docbook-apps list - http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/index.php