Re: Where, what and how - The future of DocBook

["Alan W. Irwin" <irwin at beluga dot phys dot uvic dot ca>]

I am a member of a two-man team that converted a largish piece (more than
100 pages) of technical documentation from latexinfo to DocBook 4.1 XML.
Fortunately, my partner is a real smart cookie so I let him handle most of
the technical end.  I have concentrated on editing the syntax changes with
considerable help from him on doing the routine part of it with scripts.

Since the conversion was completed I have been entering lots of extra
content with an ordinary editor (jed).  I understand there is a great
DocBook interface available with emacs, but I haven't bothered with it yet
because it is not really needed. From my experience I would assert you don't
need any special tool to edit and improve documentation written in DocBook.
The tags that are ordinarily used are easy to memorize.  Of course, it
probably helps that I am a good touch typist. If you don't have that skill I
guess you need to find some tool that gives you WYSIWYG.  But it wasn't
necessary in my case, and I suspect that is true for most documenters.

To move away from this useful but still rather generalized discussion, the
only real concern I have about DocBook at the moment is getting glitch-free
builds of our documentation with Cygnus DocBook 4.1 XML on Redhat 6.2
systems.... ;-)

The major glitch for us is the pdfjadetex command does not work in the
slightest (see my previous postings). I am confident that problem is such a
glaring error with such a simple demonstration that it will be rapidly
solved.  We have no such glitches on our Debian DocBook 4.1 XML system for
building our documentation so it provides a nice comparison to help sort out
problems in the recent 4.1 XML Cygnus version of DocBook.

Alan

email: irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6 
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