Learning XML, 2nd Edition

A Bigger Example: DocBook

The last example was relatively simple, lacking complex structures like lists, tables and footnotes. It also was quite short, taking up only one page. Clearly, this lack of a challenge is an insult to any self-respecting XSL formatter. So let us set our sights on something more challenging.

Let us return to our old friend DocBook for inspiration. We will include support for most of the common elements you would find in technical prose, including some objects we have not covered yet, such as tables, lists, and footnotes. To flex the muscles of pagination, we will also explore the use of different page masters and conditional master sequences.

To save you from having to look at a huge, monolithic listing, I’ll break up the stylesheet into manageable chunks interspersed with friendly narrative.

Page Masters

We will start by setting up the page masters. This is a very verbose piece of the stylesheet, since we want to create a page master for each type of page. I chose to cover these types:

1. Lefthand (verso) page starting a chapter. It happens to have an even numbered page number, which we will use to identify it in the page sequence master. The layout will include a header that shows the chapter title and number and a body that is pushed down further than a non-starting page.

2. Righthand (recto) page starting a chapter. The main difference is that its page number is odd, and the header is right-justified instead of justified on the left.

3. Verso page that does not ...