Install docbook-xsl with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• dbtoepub

Project history

The DocBook project describes the XSLT 1.0 stylesheets as dating to the early 2000s and replacing older DSSSL stylesheets from the 1990s.

The stylesheets lived for years on SourceForge as part of the DocBook project, then moved to GitHub, where the xslt10-stylesheets repository is now the intended repository of record.

The 1.79.2 release snapshot, published in the DocBook CDN in December 2016, became the long-lived stable version many distributions continue to ship.

Adoption history

Adoption is broad and old-school: DocBook XSL is packaged by Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, Arch, MacPorts, Nix, MSYS2, Alpine, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and other ecosystems because build systems and documentation packages still depend on it.

Many downstream projects layer their own branding or output customizations on top of the stock stylesheets, such as SUSE's DocBook stylesheet customization layer.

How it is used

The package is installed as shared XML/XSL resources, usually consumed by xsltproc, Saxon, or build systems that transform DocBook sources.

Its outputs cover the practical documentation formats that made DocBook popular: chunked HTML, single-page HTML, XSL-FO for print/PDF, man pages, EPUB, and help-system formats.

Why package nerds care

This is infrastructure you notice mostly when it breaks: thousands of source packages, manuals, and distro docs have historically assumed DocBook XSL is present under a conventional XML catalog path.

It is also a time capsule of the XML publishing era, where packaging a stylesheet tree was as important as packaging compilers or libraries.

Timeline

• 1990s: DocBook publishing relied on SGML and DSSSL stylesheets.
• Early 2000s: the DocBook XSLT 1.0 stylesheets became the replacement XML/XSLT publishing path.
• 2009: SourceForge news shows active 1.74.x DocBook XSL and XSL-NS releases.
• 2016: DocBook XSL 1.79.2 was deployed to the DocBook CDN and became the durable stable release in many package managers.
• 2010s-2020s: development moved away from SourceForge to GitHub; newer DocBook work increasingly points users toward xslTNG when practical.

Related projects

• Related DocBook projects include the DocBook XML schemas, the older DSSSL stylesheets, the later XSLT 2.0 stylesheets, and the newer xslTNG stylesheets.
• Common companion tools include libxml2, libxslt/xsltproc, xmlto, docbook2X, Apache FOP, and distribution-specific XML catalog tooling.

Sources

• https://docbook.org/stylesheets/
• https://github.com/docbook/xslt10-stylesheets
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/
• https://sourceforge.net/p/docbook/news/
• https://cdn.docbook.org/
• https://cdn.docbook.org/release/xsl/1.79.2/
• https://github.com/openSUSE/suse-xsl