On Tue, 2002-04-09 at 13:08, Derek D. Martin wrote: > My experience with DocBook is that the only people who *want* to use > it are people who enjoy writing documentation, and they're all crazy > anyway... ;-) Last I checked (not very recent, but I believe still > accurate -- correct me please if I'm mistaken), there were no WYSIWYG > tools (or anything similar) that adequately generated DocBook format, > and the multitudinous tags are (IMO) excessively long and tedious to > deal with.
The tags take some getting used to. The ORA book is a great reference on how the tags work, and there is a simplified DocBook DTD that has only the most-often-used tags, while still being compatible with the main DocBook DTD. <BrokenRecord> DocBook is great because it separates out the authoring from the presentation. The ORA book itself was written in DB, so the authors merely had to write the content, then let the publisher define how the end product would look. My first few books I spent too much time fiddling with Word and getting pictures to line up, where pages ended, etc. Since my last few works were browser-based CBTs, I could just write in DB, spit out HTML and send that. The production company then just wrote around that and had a completed product. Questions of where pictures, video, and audio go were already answered in the HTML. </BrokenRecord> For smaller projects, DocBook has the advantage of being XML or SGML, allowing you to do things like write up boilerplate documentation and have a separate app do a fill-in-the-blank using regular XML/SGML libs. There are a few newer GUI apps for editing DB, but no real WYSIWYG apps, as...well...DB was never meant to be WYSIWYG. > I believe Lyx had rudimentary DocBook support last I looked, but not > especially usable... Has this changed? Yes and no. LyX outputs DocBook, but since DB likes to be maintained in DB format. If you get diffs from the DB, it is hard to import those changes into LyX. I guess it's similar to using Word to maintain an HTML page. You can do it, but it's not always worth the effort. -Mark ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
