[svlug] DocBook XML Opinion?

[Randy J. Ray]

> Back in 1995, I used LaTeX.  I liked this very much.  I could output to
> my Postscript printer, convert to PDF or output to HTML using
> LaTeX2HTML.  I seem to recall that the completed document was over 100
> pages.  After that I dappled around with LinuxDoc and sgmltools, but
> never really liked it that much.  Sad to say, but I didn't think that
> the documents looked that nice and both didn't handle graphics
> smoothly.
> 
> Now, it appears that everyone is using DocBook.  Or, are they?  I know
> nothing about DocBook.  Please help.

Starting with Norm Walsh's site is the best advice I can offer. There are at 
least two O'Reilly titles that were authored in DocBook-- _DocBook: the 
Definitive Guide_, and _Programming Jabber_. Note that the HTML edition of the 
DocBook book on Norm's site is completely transformed from the XML source. So 
it is possible to create clean, attractive-looking HTML from DocBook. It's 
just like any other XML (well, to be fair, DocBook was originally defined as 
an SGML application, but it has been converted to XML for some time now), only 
the structure is specifcally geared towards authoring books and articles. The 
key will lay in creating stylesheets that create the look you want. The 
stylesheets used for processing the DocBook text are downloadable, so you can 
start with those if you like.

Randy
-- 
rjray at blackperl.com          http://www.rjray.org         http://www.svsm.org

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