Why is there a period after the block title in the PDF output?

If your document has blocks that have block titles, you may notice in the PDF output (as generated by a2x using the --fop flag) that a period gets added to the end of the block title.

You won’t see the period in the intermediary DocBook XML that’s generated when creating a PDF. Alas, it’s added by the DocBook XSL templates when the DocBook XML is converted to FO XML.

Here’s the attribute that controls what character is added after a block title and before the content (hint: it’s a period)

runinhead.default.title.end.punct

Default punctuation character on a run-in-head
See: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.78.1/doc/html/runinhead.default.title.end.punct.html

To get rid of it, you can add the following XSL parameter default in the docbook-xsl/common.xsl file that ships with AsciiDoc:

<xsl:param name="runinhead.default.title.end.punct"/>

The trailing period will be a goner.