Sphinx DocBook Builder

fork of the original work produced by @EronHennessey

A Sphinx builder to generate DocBook output (sphinx_docbook.docbook_builder).

Installing

python3 -m pip install sphinx_docbook

Prerequisites

Before installing sphinx_docbook on Linux, you'll need the following prerequisites:

• libxml2 and headers
• Python bindings for libxml2
• libxslt1 headers (libxslt1-dev)
• Python headers (python3-dev)

You can install these on Ubuntu / Debian by running:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev python3-lxml python3-dev

You can install these on Fedora by running:

sudo dnf install libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt-devel python3-lxml python3-devel

DocBook template files

When using a DocBook template file, use {{data.root_element}} and {{data.contents}} to represent the root element (chapter, section, etc.) and {{data.contents}} to represent the transformed contents of your .rst source.

For example, you could use a template that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE {{data.root_element}} PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
            "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd">
<{{data.root_element}}>
    {{data.contents}}
</{{data.root_element}}>

A template is only necessary if you want to customize the output. A standard DocBook XML header will be included in each output file by default.

Using the Sphinx Docbook builders

To build DocBook output with Sphinx, add sphinx_docbook.docbook_builder to the extensions list in conf.py:

extensions = [
    #... other extensions here ...
    'sphinx_docbook.docbook_builder',
]

There are two configurable parameters for conf.py that correspond to rst2db.py parameters:

Name	Description	Default
docbook_template_file	Template file that will be used to position the document parts. This should be a valid DocBook .xml file that contains Requires Jinja2 to be installed if specified.	"section"
docbook_default_root_element	Default root element for a file-level document. Default is 'section'.	None
docbook_use_xml_id_in_titles	Control to enable the use of xml:id=... attribute in title XML tags.	False

For example:

docbook_template_file = 'dbtemplate.xml'
docbook_default_root_element = chapter

Then, build your project using sphinx-build with the -b docbook option:

sphinx-build source output -b docbook

License

This software is provided under the BSD 3-Clause license. See the LICENSE file for more details.