[ale] Tools for writing docbook?

[Grady Harris]

I've written a few short tutorials for work using DocBook, and as long as I
didn't try to rely on my memory, it was not difficult (in contrast with mark-up
I've done using the Text Encoding Initiative schema). It is very similar to
editing html in a text editor--I use jEdit, with the XML plug-ins, most
frequently for this, which gives me a contextual list of permitted elements
with each opening less-than, and validates against the DTD as I go.

Go ahead & give it a try--I spent a great deal of time studying English
prosody--XML is just another set of stanzaic & stichic forms, & the rules are a
lot less complex than those of, say, a sestina or a canzone.

As Jason says, you'll need FOP to process the results to PDF, but once you get
things set up, it's as simple as:
saxon tutorial.xml docbook.xsl > tutorial.fo
fop tutorial.fo tutorial.pdf

Of course, that glosses over az couple of things, such as the path to the
docbook stylesheets, but the guides to both DocBook and DocBook XSL are
available freely online, as are the stylesheets themselves:
http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/

I'm starting in on a more extensive use, recasting a manual at work into
DocBook, so I might change my tune about how easy it is real soon.

Grady Harris

Quoting ale-request at ale.org:
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 12:33:50 -0400
> From: Jason Day <jasonday at worldnet.att.net>
> Subject: Re: [ale] Tools for writing docbook?
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
>
> On Sun, Aug 15, 2004 at 11:37:15AM -0400, BruceG wrote:
> > 	So - are there any tools that simplify editing and writing a docbook and
> that
> > show you what the finished product would look like? Or do you manually edit
> > the raw file, keeping a reference of docbook formatting commands (kind of
> > like editing html in a text editor?). I'd like to help a project, but don't
> > want to bite off more than I can chew.
>
> Xmlmind is pretty good: http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/ .  The
> standard version is a free download, and it does a pretty good job of
> transforming docbook xml to html.  It's a java application though, so
> you'll need a pretty beefy machine to get decent performance.
>
> If you need to transform to pdf or other formats, you'll need to either
> buy the professional version, or do the transform yourself with FO.  See
> http://docbook.sourceforge.net/ and
> http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html.
>
> HTH,
> Jason
> --
> Jason Day                                       jasonday at
> http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net