Glossary #

The DTD (Document Type Definition) defines the exact elements, entities attributes and structure available in an XML or HTML document.

The DOCTYPE, or Document Type Declaration, not to be confused with a Document Type Definition, contains the information on the DTD to use with an XML document. Therefore, it also defines which particular XML format is for the document.

DAPS provides authors of technical documentation with an easy-to-use tool chain to convert their DocBook documents into various output formats.

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation published as a DTD.

An entity connects one or multiple characters with a unique identifier. One example where this is used is for escaping characters that are necessary for XML markup. A character such as & must be written as the entity & in XML.

You can also declare custom entities.

Renders the XSL-FO files which are created by the DocBook XSL stylesheets into various output formats. The output format used most often is likely PDF. Formats that can usually be rendered into include:

Well-known formatters include Apache FOP, XEP, and Antenna House Formatter. Whereas the former is an open source product, the latter two are proprietary solutions. Antenna House Formatter is incompatible with DAPS.

Within this guide, main element refers to any XML element that is commonly used to create a coherent whole in an output format. In other words, either a book, an article, or a set.

PDF is a page description format created by Adobe Systems in 1993. Today, it is widely adopted as the standard format for digitally distributed page-oriented documents. A major advantage of PDF is that the formats can be reproduced identically across different platforms.

PIs can be used to mark certain content as having to be treated differently by writing an instruction enclosed in <? and ?>. This is commonly used within (X)HTML Web pages to mark parts of the file as being written in server-side scripting language PHP.

In DocBook, Processing Instructions can also be used for somewhat more mundane purposes, such as setting the background color of a preceding image.

Through profiling, you can easily adapt your documentation to different variants of a product. For example, a manufacturer of white-label products might appreciate being able to easily replace the brand name for the product they sell.

It is possible to further this concept and even replace entire sections of text— for example, depending on a product's target group (if documentation is generated for the entry-level or for the professional version of a product).

A project consists of all the files that lie in a directory structure as required by DAPS, with the first directory level containing any DC files and subdirectories for xml files and images. When the first Main Element is built, an additional subdirectory called build will be created.

Such a project directory may contain the source files for multiple main elements.

SVG is an XML-based vector graphics format, which is supported by most modern Web browsers.

Vector graphics formats are different from traditional raster graphics in that they describe the exact shape of an object instead of using the lossy process of subdividing an object into individual raster points (such as pixels).

In the context of DocBook, the term stylesheet usually refers to the XSLT stylesheets used to transform DocBook documents into their respective output formats.

Data transformation converts data from a source data format into a destination data format. An example is the process of converting a DocBook XML document into HTML by using an XSLT processor.

Validation refers to the process of checking whether an XML document is formally correct, for example, checking if all XML tags are properly closed and nested. This is done using a DTD or XML Schema.

If a document is valid that does not mean that its contents are factually correct or that it is structured as you intended. However, validity does mean that a document can be further processed, for example by a Web browser, or an XSL processor.

XIncludes are references to other DocBook files. XIncludes can be used to split one large file into multiple smaller, more manageable files. For example, instead of having an entire book in a single file, you can create one central file from which you can reference individual chapter files.

When using a version control system within your documentation process, having smaller files can help to avoid version conflicts if you and co-workers are working on different chapters of the same book.

XML Catalogs can be used to make DTDs available locally, so they do not need to be downloaded over the network every time they are accessed.

Also known as an XML Processor, an XML Parser is used to provide the structural information contained in an XML file to another application.

XOP (XML-binary Optimized Packaging) is a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation on how to represent binary data inside XML documents.

XML is a markup language with rules to encode documents into a form that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

XSL is a collective noun used to refer to XSLT, XSL-FO, and the XML Path Language (XPath).

See also XSLT, XSL-FO.

FO, XSL-FO or Extensible Stylesheet Language-Formatting Objects is a markup language used to mediate between other XML representations and a page formatting format such as PDF.

See also XSLT.

XSLT or Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations is a language based on XML. It is used to transform XML documents.