Leif Madsen wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 15:34:08 -0700, Chris TraversJust to clarify and explain. Docbook is an SGML subset which is used to markup documentation. The Linux Documentation Project uses it extensively.
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just submitting this to the list as a whole for peer review and additional feedback.
General suggestions for authoring:
1) Learn LaTeX or at least LyX. It will professionally arrange your table of contents, index, etc. quite well, and your publisher can control the layout quite well using external style sheets. If your publisher doesn;t want to go to this trouble it will still greatly simplify your creation and maintenance of your book as it becomes longer.
Also, if you end up publishing it yourself, LaTeX will provide you with great features which will make your life MUCH easier and your work MUCH more professional-looking. Personally I write all my documents in LaTeX using vim but that is strictly a matter of personal preference.
You could use Docbook SGML or XML instead of LaTeX, but I find LaTeX
much simpler ot use.
I personally love DocBook. Works very well for this type of thing. I can't comment on LaTeX as I've never used it, but I'm sure its very similar. If you want to see a project which uses DocBook, check out the Asterisk-Docs project. Obviously a work in progress, but its allowed us to very simply generate HTML and PDFs.
LaTeX is a set of TeX macros to allow simple development of printed material. (TeX is a typesetting program and langauge developed for such projects as mathematics textbooks.)
To generate a PDF from Docbook, you put it through the following stages: 1: Convert DocBook SGML to LaTeX 2: Convert LaTeX to PDF.
I find LaTeX to be extremely easy to use once you get the hang of it, and like Docbook, it is content oriented, so you can apply the actual layout rules separately from the document.
LyX is nothing more than a structured LaTeX editor (What you See is what you Mean). I personally write my LaTeX docs in vim because I find that I have more control over them and LyX isn't so good at business card design.
Generally speaking, if you want to generate HTML as well as PDF and Postscript, you do best with docbook. I prefer LaTeX however for simple PDF generation because it is extremely mature and extensible. LaTeX is ideal also if you just want to create postscript documents for printing or publishing.
BTW, all of the whitepapers at http://www.metatrontech.com/wpapers are written in LaTeX.
LaTeX and Docbook are both high-end projects designed to work for real publishing tasks. In most respects, they are much more advanced than something like Adobe Pagemaker.
Best Wishes, Chris Travers
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