[OSGeo-Edu] Comments and Questions on Docbook

[Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas]

Hi Landon

2008/1/22, Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com>:
>
> I took some time to look over Docbook last night. This included skimming a
> Docbook crash course and messing around with XMLMind.
>
>
>
> XMLMind definitely seems to be the most fully featured Docbook editor, and
> would be a good choice for authors not familiar with XML.
>

After trying some XML authoring tools, even XMLMind and oXygen 9, I
have to admit that new XML editor of Eclipse 3.3 (europa) is the
nicest editor I've found as it does everything I need (included spell
checking...).

oXygen is really good (Jeroen told me to try it). The "Author" mode
would be really really comfortable to use if it wouldn't be SO slow.

>
>
> I personally found it a bit awkward, and figured I would be more comfortable
> working in a text editor. I'd probably still write the content in OpenOffice
> and would then cut and paste to a XML template file. My comfort with the raw
> text editor may be a result of my programming background.
>
>
>
> I think Docbook would be a workable solution, but I think some templates
> would be key. (For example, we could set up a template for Free GIS Book
> chapters or for OSGeo Journal Articles.)
>

In the Spanish Free GIS Book group we decided LaTeX as editing tool
for many reasons, and I think for that kind of content is the best. I
see Docbook better for more technical content like user and developer
docs. As you know, there is no better tool for writing equations than
LaTeX at this moment.

Not sure how to deal with Docbook and MathML.....

>
>
> I'd like to check out the PDF format generated from Docbook. Can anyone get
> me started with that conversion as quickly as possible? What conversion tool
> would you recommend?

I'm using Apache FOP, but it's difficult to customize the results but
not impossible. You will have to deal with XSLT....

Docbook XSL complete guide is a good place to start to play with XSL
customization layer:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/index.html

Cheers
-- 
Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas
Ingeniero en Geodesia y Cartografía
http://www.geomaticblog.net
http://www.prodevelop.es