Charles Engelke's Blog

One problem using MSXSL as our XSLT
processor becomes apparent when we try to do something a bit
fancier: convert a single DocBook file to multiple HTML pages.
There’s a stylesheet to do that called chunk.xsl,
so we should be able to create the output with the command

But when we try it with our first sample DocBook file, we get an
error message:

Error occurred while executing stylesheet
'c:\Program Files\docbook\xsl\html\chunk.xsl'.

Code:   0x80004005
Don't know how to chunk with Microsoft

Creating multiple output files from a single DocBook source file
is called chunking, and it’s not a
standard feature of XSLT processors. MSXSL can’t do it, so we
just can’t create multiple HTML pages using it. Instead, we can
use some other XSLT processor that can perform this non-standard
function. There are several to choose from, but a lot of the
documentation in the DocBook XSL stylesheets refers to one called
Saxon, so we’ll try that next.

Now we can use Saxon to convert DocBook
to various formats. The regular conversion isn’t too different
from the MSXSL approach. Recall that
you converted DocBook to HTML with the command:

(where the \ shows where the text on the second line above should
really be typed). To use Saxon instead, type the command

It’s verbose, but simple.

Use the same command with the chunk.xsl style
sheet to get multiple pages of output:

This ignores the -o sample.html parameter,
always naming the main page index.html and
creating names for all other pages.

That’s plenty for today. Next time we will look at creating
Microsoft HTML Help format files from DocBook.