I agree that the power of docbook is in its ability to generate multiple
formats.

At my last position I generated single and multi-page HTML and PDF for a
multi-product, multi-version docset. (I'm sorry, I'm not able to provide a
public URL here).

It did involve a fair amount of work, and I agree that when there is an
issue it can be complicated to track down and fix. The bits I found
particularly tricky were wrapping text (in tables mainly) so that the PDF
text stayed inside its margins, and the PDF cross-references. Can go into
some more detail on this if you like.

Bob's book and the support on these lists is awesome though - and there
wasn't a problem that I couldn't eventually fix.

I would also +1 the advantages of having a tool-chain that can be
incorporated into CI. We used svn/maven/docbkx-tools/jenkins plus some
other in-house tools.

Nat

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Katie Welles <[email protected]> wrote:

> It’s been a while since I’ve used Docbook or participated in this forum.
>
> I used Docbook a number of years ago to put together a web-based API
> reference system. To be frank, I found it to be a pretty painful project,
> but mainly because I thought it was downright foolish to jump through all
> those Docbook hoops just to output simple HTML. It seems to me that the
> power of Docbook is when your single XML source is used for multiple
> outputs.
>
> I support a consortium that manages 12+ open APIs, and we’ve been
> re-examining the tools we use to output published specs. We know we want
> **all** our API specs to be available as PDF and also HTML, but are not
> sure which tool to bank on. So far we’ve been looking at asciidoc, which I
> find pretty underwhelming.
>
> Have any of you PDF + HTML output with Docbook? If anyone has such a
> project and will be willing to show it off, send some URLs!
>
> As an aside: Have any of you used asciidoc?
>
> (BTW — I use MadCap Flare for another of my clients. The output is
> stunningly beautiful, but the tool is far too unwieldy and expensive for me
> to be able to recommend it to my API client.)
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