DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Creating DocBook Documents

This chapter explains in concrete, practical terms how to make DocBook documents. It’s an overview of all the kinds of markup that are possible in DocBook documents. It explains how to create several kinds of DocBook documents: books, sets of books, chapters, articles, and reference manual entries. The idea is to give you enough basic information to actually start writing. The information here is intentionally skeletal; you can find the details in the reference section of this book.

Making an XML Document

An XML document consists of an optional XML declaration, an optional Document Type Declaration, which includes an optional internal subset, and a document (or root) element. We’ll discuss each of these in turn.

In XML vocabularies like DocBook, which are defined with RELAX NG (and also in the case of vocabularies defined with W3C’s XML Schema), it is common to omit the Document Type Declaration entirely. The Document Type Declaration associates a document with a particular Document Type Definition (DTD).

An XML Declaration

XML documents often begin with an XML declaration that identifies a few simple aspects of the document, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Identifying the version of XML ensures that future changes to the XML specification will not alter the semantics of this document. The encoding declaration tells the processor what character encoding this document uses. It must match the actual encoding that you use. The complete ...