PhD Docbook renderer


PhD is a DocBook XML renderer. It converts DocBook markup into presentable formats such as HTML Help, PDF, and many more. PhD was originally written specific for the PHP project, its however generic enough for other projects outside PHP.net to use.

History

PhD was born from a Google Summer of Code project in 2007, where the focus was on developing an application to replace the Docbook-XSL toolchain the PHP project was using to render their documentations. The initial project goal was to work on an application called Livedocs, but after a review of the application it was decided it would be better to start from scratch.
One of the primary goals of PhD was to make it easier for the documentation team to make rendering style changes without needing to dig through endless XSLT magic, and is therefore written in PHP - which most people are very familiar with. The other goal was performance. PhD was written with performance in mind, and reduced the rendering time of the PHP.net manual from over an hour, down to 2minutes.
The first public release of PhD was the 0.1 Release Candidate October 2, with the first "stable" release October 20

Google Summer of Code

PhD have entered Google Summer of Code twice, in 2008 and 2009, as one of the projects for PHP.