[TriLUG] docbook & help guides

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Douglas Kojetin <djkojeti at unity.ncsu.edu> writes:
> my question is, what do i need (on the webserver end) to produce the
> single page HTML, multi page HTML and PDF documents?

A lot of people still use various DSSSL style sheets that have been
around for quite a while---most of the references people have made so
far are for various flavors of those.

They're pretty stable, in both the good and bad senses of that term;
that is, they perform well, and generally give good output, but DSSSL
is thought, in many (but not all) quarters, to be a dead issue.

Another alternative, and the one I use (and have used for two or three
years of developing docs using Docbook now), is the Docbook xslt
stylesheet collection (http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook), along
with xsltproc (for HTML output) and passivetex (for PDF output).

This solution is not, at least for PDF output, quite as mature as the
DSSSL solution---though the HTML output is good, and has lots of hooks
for tweaking the output---but it is fast for HTMl output, and there is
an approaching critical mass of tools that work using this method of
doing the formatting that will, I think, soon kill DSSSL once and for
all.

For instance, conglomerate (http://www.conglomerate.org/index.php),
which is shaping up to be a good, fast XML editor is starting to
incorporate support for xmlroff (http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/),
which is a good, fast (not-yet-complete) xml-fo to print/pdf engine,
which means Linux users should soon have a good structured XML editor
which can render directly to PDF...but only using the XSL stylesheets,
not DSSSL.

Let anyone misinterpret---I don't have anything against DSSSL; in
fact, I suspect I would actually prefer its listp/scheme-based syntax
to the XML syntax of XSL (I have written a fairly complete Dia UML
diagram to SQL DDL stylesheet, and would have really appreciated the
fingernail clippings of DSSSL to the sheer verbosity of XSL).  But
DSSSL has been pretty much disavowed by its creators, and, IMHO, only
has users at all because at the moment it represents the best docbook
to pdf solution on free OSes.

Mike
-- 
In the fields a body's burning, as the war machine keeps turning -- Black Sabbath