Re: [docbook-apps] Newbie's therapy

["Dave Brooks, BCS Systems" <dave@bcs.co.nz>]

At 00:12 24/05/2003 +0300, Antonios Christofides wrote:
>Could you please give me a hint on which tools you'd recommend, and a
>couple of guidelines to get me going?  Thanks! And I promise I'll flood
>you with more specific questions afterwards :-)

When I first tried Docbook (two years ago) it was with the 
DSSSL/Openjade/JadeTeX tools, as a requirement was for good quality printed 
output, and TeX based output engines offered the best quality.

I eventually gave up the struggle and the documentation project was put on 
the back burner.

Meanwhile I started using XML and XSLT for web-based projects (the same XML 
sources generating HTML, PHP, SQL, etc, just by writing different 
stylesheets), so when the original documentation project resurfaced a 
couple of months ago there was no question of using anything other than the 
XSL stylesheets.

xsltproc has been my XSLT engine of choice - it's fast and works, supports 
xinclude, etc (thank you Daniel).

Because I've been a long time fan of TeX, I started off using PassiveTeX as 
the FO to PDF engine and was quite successful with the first versions of 
our manual. However, I also soon realised that PassiveTeX has a number of 
limitations and 'funnies' so I investigated some of the commercial FO to 
PDF tools and bought a copy of XEP - it just works and has done everything 
asked of it so far.


Good luck,


David Brooks