can't create PDFs from DocBook XML

[Markus Hoenicka]

Hi all,

I'm trying to transform a simple test document to PDF using
Passivetex. I'm not sure where to look for the error, but something in
the toolchain doesn't cooperate, resulting in the following TeX error
message:

! Missing number, treated as zero.
<to be read again>
p
l.2 ...egy="charact er-by-character" language="en">
<fo:layout-master-set><fo:...

The start of the FO file up to what the error message points to looks
like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" font-family="serif" font-s
ize="10pt" text-align="justify" line-height="normal" font-selection-strategy="ch
aracter-by-character" language="en">< fo:layout-master-set>

that is, it chokes on the first element. The transformation to HTML
works just fine BTW.

My setup is:

FreeBSD 4.7
docbook-xsl-1.61.3_1
Passivetex 1.21
xmltex 1.9
xsltproc --version says: Using libxml 20428, libxslt 10023 and libexslt 714
(same result with Saxon though)

The sequence of commands to reproduce the problem:

xsltproc /usr/local/share/xsl/docbook/fo/docbook.xsl test1.xml >
test1.fo

pdfxmltex test1.fo

A test document to reproduce the problem:

--8<----
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
"/usr/local/share/xml/docbook/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd">
<book>
<title>Test document</title>
<chapter>
<title>Exampl e</title>
<para>This is a para.</para>
</chapter>
</book>
--8<----

Any hints? Am I missing something obvious?

TIA
Markus