This is a set of XSL stylesheets for transforming DocBook 5 XML into (X)HTML5, developed as part of the Research and Education Space project in order to produce specific mark-up from our DocBook 5 sources.

They have no direct connection to the extremely comprehensive official DocBook XSL stylesheets, and don't have the same level of element coverage, but you may find them easier to modify than the official XSL package.

To use remotely:

xsltproc --xinclude http://bbcarchdev.github.io/docbook-html5/docbook-html5.xsl source.xml > dest.html

Or, if you have a local copy (for example, as a git submodule):

xsltproc --nonet --xinclude /path/to/docbook-html5.xsl source.xml > dest.html

There are currently two parameters supported:

html.linksfile: specifies the (full) path to an XML file whose root element is include, and whose contents will be substituted into the HTML head element, primarily in order to include links to CSS stylesheets in the output.

html.navfile: specifies the (full) path to an XML file whose root element is include, and whose contents will be substituted into a nav element within the output document's header. Typically, the contents are an un-ordered list making up global navigation elements.

Note that xsltproc will interpret html.linksfile and html.navfile as URLs relative to the stylesheet path, and so you may need to specify a file:// prefix to a local path.

With both parameters, a full processing command might be:

xsltproc --xinclude --param html.linksfile "'file:///path/to/links.xml'" --param html.navfile "'file:///path/to/nav.xml'" /path/or/url/to/docbook-html5.xsl source.xml > dest.html

(Note that double-quoting is used to ensure that the actual quotation marks are passed to xsltproc to indicate that the parameter value is a string).