[PLUG] DocBook

[AthlonRob]

I know we have at least a few published authors here... so I thought I'd
check and see - what did you guys use to create your books?

I'm involved with a project that's using DocBook to create a book... an
online manual of sorts.  It was being built in to HTML/PDF/PS/whatever
on a FreeBSD box using a BSD Make-based toolchain.  However, as we're
migrating the project to a Linux box, this is no longer an option.

So, I went looking for how to do this.  The book is written in SGML with
each chapter having its own directory, generally with a single file in
the directory (chapter.sgml), in the "root" directory, there's
book.sgml, authors.sgml, glossary.sgml, a .dsl file, and various logos
and such.

It would seem to me, with as popular a format as it seems DocBook is,
there would be an *easy* way to take this layout and convert it to a
PDF, single-page HTML, and multi-page HTML tree.

Looking around, however, it seems there is not.  Does anybody know why
not?  And has anybody here home-grown something that might work or be
adaptable and useful by the community at large?

It just seems so odd there isn't some well documented simple way of
dealing with DocBook trees like this.  :-\

Rob