[PLUG] DocBook

[Ian Burrell]

On 5/13/05, AthlonRob <athlonrob at axpr.net> wrote:
> 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.  :-\
> 

There is the docbook-tools software from RedHat, 
http://sources.redhat.com/docbook-tools/.  It is packaged as
docbook-utils.  It can convert to PDF and lots of other formats.  As
long as there is a single master .sgml file which includes the others,
and a .dsl stylesheet you want to use, it works just fine.

 - Ian