Editing DocBook (section)

== Output formats ==

DocBook files are used to prepare output files in a wide variety of formats. Nearly always, this is accomplished using [[DocBook XSL]] stylesheets. These are [[XSLT]] stylesheets that transform DocBook documents into a number of formats ([[HTML]], [[XSL-FO]] for later conversion into [[PDF]], etc.). These stylesheets can be sophisticated enough to generate tables of contents, glossaries, and indexes. They can oversee the selection of particular designated portions of a master document to produce different versions of the same document (such as a "tutorial" or a "quick-reference guide", where each of these consist of a subset of the material). Users can write their own customized stylesheets or even a full-fledged program to process the DocBook into an appropriate output format as their needs dictate.

Norman Walsh and the DocBook Project development team maintain the key application for producing output from DocBook source documents: A set of [[XSLT]] stylesheets (as well as a legacy set of [[DSSSL]] stylesheets) that can generate high-quality [[HTML]] and print ([[XSL Formatting Objects|FO]]/[[Portable Document Format|PDF]]) output, as well as output in other formats, including [[Rich Text Format|RTF]], [[man page]]s and HTML Help.

Web help<ref name=webhelp-1.76.1 /> is a chunked HTML output format in the [[DocBook XSL]] stylesheets that was introduced in version 1.76.1. The documentation for web help<ref>[http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/webhelp/docs/index.html Web help documentation]</ref> also provides an example of web help and is part of the DocBook XSL distribution.

The major features are its fully CSS-based page layout, search of the help content, and a table of contents in collapsible-tree form. Search has [[stemming]], match highlighting, explicit page-scoring, and the standard multilingual [[Tokenization (lexical analysis)|tokenizer]]. The search and TOC are in a pane that appears as a [[Frameset (HTML)|frameset]], but is actually implemented with [[div and span|div tags]] and cookies (so that it is progressive).