Re: [docbook-apps] is docbook the right tool for the job?

[David Tolpin <dvd@davidashen.net>]

> On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:46:59PM +1000,
>  Jason Lewis <jason@dickson.st> wrote 
>  a message of 30 lines which said:
> 
> > I want to have a printed catalogue for my business, of all the
> > products we sell. I have a database that has all the information in
> > it and I was hoping to generate the catalogue from my database into
> > a docbook format using perl,
> 
> I believe that it is not the best use of DocBook. DocBook is for
> authors. For producing documents automatically, may be LaTeX would be
> better.
> 

XML is good, but the generall approach is not to generate DocBook with perl (python, ruby,
cobol, lisp, whatever), but to retrieve database data and represent it in XML. 

Then, using XSLT transformations, convert the data to DocBook, or any other format 
of choice. In case of database to PDF transformations, DocBook is not necessarily
the best intermediate format. While it saves from learning XSL FO, it brings in
significant limitations of a content model specifically oriented at text documents,
not data.

A sequence of custom steps that transform the retrieved data into XSL FO would
do better.

  DBMS->XML->XSL FO->PDF

David