Markdown to DocBook - md2doc.xsl

Conversion tool for transforming markdown formatted text files to valid DocBook documents. Project is based on XSLT 2.0 technology.

XSL is developed under Saxon XSLT processor. See below why

• Better regex support than native XPath specification (using flag ! for java regex)
• PHP API (Saxon/C)
• Great performance

For demo, converter, documentation or more info, please visit: www.markdown2docbook.com

Features

• Awesome everything!
• Cake is a lie!

Getting started

Downloading the stylesheet is pretty much all you have to do. I assume you have editors/tools for running XSLT. Be sure you have Saxon processor version 9.5 and higher. It doesn't matter if you have free Home Edition or commercial EE respectively PE. It works on the whole family!

1. Importing md2doc stylesheet into another stylesheet

Let's say you have your own xsl stylesheet and you want to use certain md2doc functions. There is nothing easier. Use <xsl:import> element. Don't forget about namespace! Be sure to add md2doc URI http://www.markdown2docbook.com/ns/markdown2docbook among other namespace declarations. Example:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     xmlns:md2doc="http://www.markdown2docbook.com/ns/md2doc"> ...

Now you can use following md2doc functions:

• convert(xs:string $input, xs:string $headline-element, xs:string $root-element)
  Transforms markdown string input into DocBook. Ideally used inside template that can match markdown text. Headline element defines structure based on headlines. For example, if $headline-element = 'chapter' all h1 headlines are taken as chapter and its siblings are grouped together. Otherwise root element defines if whole document should be wrapped in root element like <book> or <article>.

  To be clear, headline element is defining component-level tag and root element is defining division-level tag of DocBook. If you want to use some component-level tag like article as a root one, you can use this function like this: convert($input, '', 'article').

  If you don't want to use root (division-level) element, leave it blank. For example:
  convert($input, 'chapter', '')
  WARNING This usage does not return well-formed document!

  If you leave second and third argument blank, eg. convert($input, '',''), headline grouping will use sect1-6 and no division and no component elements are used. This also does not produce well-formed document.

• read-file(xs:string $uri, xs:string $encoding)
  Attempts to read a file on path defined by $uri. If file can be located and has correct enconding as supplied by second argument, function returns content of the file as a string. Otherwise, it shows error message. You can use this to supply input for convert() functions.

• get-html(xs:string $input)
  This function simulates Markdown parsing into HTML. It creates same output as original parser by Mark Gruber written in Perl. When talking about DocBook, you won't probably find usage for this function at all, but it can be used as a way how to parse Markdown to HTML using XSLT 2.0.

• get-processor-info()
  Returns information such as product name and version of installed XSLT processor.

2. Using stylesheet to convert markdown documents

Running with parameters and property options like -it main-from-file

### 3. Running stylesheet over DocBook XML document ###

Markdown should be somehow identified, so stylesheet could recognize it.