The ducc documentation has been written in latex (instead of docbook). Although I would encourage people to use similar tooling (to reduce the mental load when working on the different parts of the UIMA project), I feel it's OK to use other tooling if it helps.
However, this has raised some issues: 1) There are some standard boiler-plate things done for all docbook documentation that need to be duplicated for the latex approach. One of these is the legal boilerplate at the beginning of the book; there may be more... 2) Because the docbooks are using a common set of styling choices, the documentation produced by them has a fairly uniform feel. It would be nice if the styling setup for the output produced by the latex could be adjusted so the look/feel of the documentation would match; the users should not be concerned about which tool was used to produce it. This is a matter of some editing of the CSS styling files, perhaps. 3) The docbook approach also supported cross-book linking, including in printed matter in PDF format (where it would insert the page number). It does this by maintaining a "database" that associates a printed page number with the hyperlinks. I have no idea if there's a way to do cross book linking from LaTeX to docbook. We probably also need to expand our "one-time-setup" page to include instructions on how to get and install latex, saying that it's needed for building the ducc documentation. -Marshall
