I'm trying to find a content markup system (authoring and processing) that can output to various formats. Something which can be both viewed and printed, such as PDF, is probably a must, and something easily accessed online, such as HTML is close behind. If I could also produce CHM (or similar) Windows help files that would be nice too.
I come from a IBM BookMaster background so I'm comfortable with content markup, and don't really need an authoring tool to work with it. DocBook seems to fit most of my needs but the markup syntax is user-hostile. The DocBook wiki points to a number of authoring tools, most of which are just generic XML editors. The only DocBook-specific tool there verges on the unusable. It also lists Lyx which seems a mature and usable tool for Latex, and produces highly attractive PDF documents. I read though that getting attractive HTML out of it is difficult. If I understand correctly I have to choose a target language for Lyx from the start: I can't start off with Latex and then later decide to I want to target DocBook, for example. So having got Lyx installed I'm looking in more detail at DocBook. A lot of the information seems to be out of date. There's a Lyx-to-X project that only works up to v1.2.0 of Lyx, and some old discussions on various sites of needing sgmltools, sgmltools-lite, or maybe sgmltools2, which appear to have been abandoned some years ago. This mailing lists contains occasional requests for help, but not too much information. If it wasn't for the information at http://www.neomantic.com/tutorials/lyx-and-docbookXML I would have concluded that DocBook support in Lyx had been effectively abandoned. I wonder then if someone could help me with the following: 1. Am I right in my thinking that if I want good quality HTML and potentially CHM output, as well as PDF, then DocBook is the way to go rather than Latex? 2. And that if I want DocBook, then I need to be using that from the start? 3. Is DocBook development in Lyx abandonded or is it just quiet for the moment? 4. Is there any documentation on what a user of the latest version of Lyx has to do to resolve the "unavailable class" messages when using DocBook, and what they need to install in 2009 to get output from it. Thanks, i
