Hello, We have used DocBook in the past for technical documentation with great success, but we currently have a use case involving generation of what you might call "generic business documents"—e.g., "policies", "procedures", "checklists", and so on.
The client supplies us with "templates" for these documents, which then need to be modified based on various end-user data. (This can be as simple as, say, substituting an organisation's name in a title, but extends right up to conditional inclusion or exclusion of paragraphs and table rows, as well as, say, populating lists with user-supplied values.) At the moment we have a prototype solution involving Word documents as the source (manipulated with Apache POI), but it's very brittle, as Word is utterly unsuited as the source format. This all seems ripe for an XML-based solution. My question for the list is simple: has anyone used DocBook to mark up this kind of "generic business document"? I have no doubt it would work, and the existing stylesheets with a customisation layer makes a very attractive starting point. If anyone has any success stories (or otherwise!), or advice, I'd love to hear them. -- Paul Hoadley https://logicsquad.net/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/logic-squad/
