DocBook xslTNG-gradle

I’ve been trying to make DocBook, and the DocBook toolchain, easier to use. I wrote xproc (for DocBook) a few weeks ago and immediately started using it. I’ve added a shell script (I haven’t yet written the Powershell equivalent) that makes it even easier to use, if you haven’t checked that out.

I started working on a couple of websites where I wanted to be able to transform DocBook sources. I copied the little Gradle extension that I’d written for xproc (for DocBook) a couple of times, and tweaked it slightly differently a couple of times, and, oh my, no that’s wrong.

So I packaged it up as a proper Gradle extension that I could reuse. Now there’s only one place to fix bugs!

It’s xsltng-gradle if⊕I’ll let you in on a little secret, you can use it to run any pipeline or transformation that you want. It does a little extra work to setup the DocBook xslTNG Stylesheets, but it won’t notice if you don’t use them. you want to give it a try.

I haven’t (yet) packaged it up and published it in the official Gradle plugins repository. I’ll get to that eventually. In the meantime, I’ve hosted a tiny Maven repository on nwalsh.com to hold it.

I hope it’s reasonably well documented. There’s an example directory in the repository that demonstrates several ways to use it.