[TriLUG] docbook & help guides

[Mike Mueller]

On Friday 15 August 2003 11:06, Douglas Kojetin wrote:
> my question is, what do i need (on the webserver end) to produce the
> single page HTML, multi page HTML and PDF documents?

My favorite topic.  I'm taking my DocBook skills out of mothballs since I 
have lots of documentation to catch up on.

You are going to build HTML and PDF on the fly?  That's makes sense.  Change 
the source and all products are then up to date. I run the tools on the 
source and distribute the products.

I am using SGML because that's what I started with, and rumor has it that PDF 
is easier or better to create from the SGML toolset.  I've attempted to 
change to XML, but so far it feels like learning PERL and Python at the same 
time (2 ways to do the same thing, so do one or the other; this is not 
intentional flamebait; 2 dichotomies in one paragraph is living dangerously)

Resources for learning DocBook:

1. patience
2. http://people.freebsd.org/%7Enik/sgmlxml.gif
3. DocBook is very powerful and that means lots of complicated controls; 
you'll need to know how stuff works and where particular files are located; 
4. I use Debian: so this is how to install tools on that distro: 
http://www.docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/DebianGnuLinuxPackages; I am sure there 
is an equivalent rpm somewhere (google is your friend)
5. good launching pad: http://docbook.org/wiki/moin.cgi/FrontPage
6. docbook.org has mailing lists for discussing language, controls, tools, 
and apps

HTH.
-- 
Mike Mueller

I've often heard of companies having a crack legal team, but this is the 
first time that I've heard of one being on crack.
- Comment on SCO's legal team by Hieronymus Howard on /.