...

I think the effect of surrounding the chapter title in an "i" element in the olink target file is intended, not a side effect as you can see in the template which generates it:

<xsl:template match="chapter|appendix" mode="insert.title.markup"> <xsl:param name="purpose"/> <xsl:param name="xrefstyle"/> <xsl:param name="title"/> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="$purpose = 'xref'"> <i> <xsl:copy-of select="$title"/> </i> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:copy-of select="$title"/> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> You can remove the <i> and </i> tags in a customization layer of the main DocBook stytlesheet which duplicates this template and modifies it by removing these tags. Apply the customization layer instead of the main DocBook stylesheet to remove the tags prior to transformations and perform the transformations at the same time (if collect.xref.targets is set to 'yes').<< I see that now. But the target database file will not validate against targetdatabase.dtd with the <i> tags. Is this a developer oversight or an error in my usage? Ray