XSL stylesheets dictate how a document written in XML should be transformed using XSLT to a particular output format. In the case of DocBook, Norman Walsh has already written, and regularly maintains some stylesheets for DocBook that provide rules for transformations from an XML DocBook document to the most commonly desirable output formats such as XHTML and PDF. The installation for Unix and Windows machines is the same.
Download the latest stylesheets from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935 and unzip the zip or gzipped tar to some suitable location. If I was running a Windows system I would use c:\lib\docbook-xsl\, if I was using a Unix system I would use c:\lib\docbook\docbook-xsl. The stylesheets are now ready to use.
The output produced by the stylesheets mentioned above is reasonable but the stylesheets mentioned above are a standard distribution and as a consequence seem to be designed to cater for the needs of the many, which is sensible, unfortunately. One may modify the stylesheets directly but more often one creates a customisation layer which imports the standard stylesheets and then one overrides specific aspects of the standard stylesheets or adds extra functionality within the customisation layer according to ones tastes. I have created a customisation layer which looks good enough for standard applications and am offering it to download.
This is particularly pertinent if you study at The University Of Birmingham because any documentation created by me there in DocBook uses this customisation layer, all the tutorials I have written conform to these stylesheets. If you your documents to have the same style as the tutorials then use this customisation layer. It is probably worth downloading the customisation layer anyway so you can see how one goes about creating a customisation layer. Here is the zipped customisation layer: custom-stylesheets.zip.
Unzip the zip to where you want the customisation layer to be situated, this could be within the stylesheets directory or in separate directory. If you unzip it to the stylesheets directory the customisation layer will unzip into the directories common, fo and xhtml. If you unzip to a separate directory these directories will be created.
Wherever you unzip the zip, it is important to change the references of the imports in the files so that they reflect the state of your system, the files fo/customfo.xsl, xhtml/customxhtml.xsl and xhtml/customchunk.xsl all have references that may need to be modified. For example, the file fo/customfo.xsl has the import line:
<!-- Import standard fo style-sheet -->
<xsl:import href="file:///c:/lib/docbook-xsl/fo/docbook.xsl"/>
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Change this to point to /where/you/put/the/stylesheets/fo/docbook.xsl
Similarly, change the entry in customchunk.xsl to point to /where/you/put/the/stylesheets/xhtml/chunk.xsl and the entry in customxhtml.xsl to point to /where/you/put/the/stylesheets/xhtml/docbook.xsl. The advantage of unzipping the zip in the same location as the standard stylesheets is that the import links may be relative (the import links can always be relative assuming the stylesheets are on the same machine, but for clarity if I am using a different directory for the customisation stylesheets I will make the import references absolute).
I have only provided customisations for FO and XHTML. It will become apparent how to use the customisation layer in the section on using the tools later. The provided customisations are listed below:
fo/customfo.xsl - Use this to generate custom FO
xhtml/customxhtml.xsl - Use this to generate custom XHTML (segmented)
xhtml/customxchunk.xsl - Use this to generate custom XHTML (chunked)
More information about customising stylesheets can be found at http://www.sagehill.net/xml/docbookxsl/.