RE: [docbook-apps] How do you manage your catalogs ?

["Kerry, Richard" <richard.kerry@atos.net>]

> That's right. I'm the only one who operates the publishing system.
> I've got a server running the Hudson continuous integration build
> manager. It checks our source code control system every night and if
> any writers have checked in changes, it launches a build. So the
> writers don't have to launch their own builds, they can just grab the
> finished output files from the server the next morning. Actually, they
> could launch their own builds if they went to the server and clicked
> "build." But they don't seem to want to do that.

It's going to be hard enough persuading anyone to try this without having to say "you can't get a proper version of the final doc without committing it and either waiting for an Overnight, or remote desktopping to the Build Server and kicking off a whole build (> 2 hours)"  so I think I need to make it straightforward to do a doc build locally.


> > Is this the common way DocBook authoring and publishing are done ?
> 
> I'm not sure. I know it's very typical to use a centralized build
> system, especially for really big doc sets. But there are so many
> different ways to handle DocBook files, I don't think there's a common
> way at all.

Ours is unlikely to be what could be referred to as "really big".

> 
> It take a little bit of learning to get yourself to the point where
> you can set up DocBook publishing for different outputs. 

I'm doing that now (intermittently).  And I don't think I can expect any (or many) of my colleagues to be involved, at least until I can show how good the result is .....

>It might make
> sense to have a centralized system so that a subset of people could do
> the XML publishing setup and then everyone's documents would be
> available in all the required formats. 

That's sort of the plan, except that it'll just be me, for the moment at least.

>If individuals don't need a
> given output format, they can ignore the files.

I'm envisaging a simple build application, which by default will build all the configured results, but can easily be switched to produce a reduced set.
This may just be a wrapper around Ant, though it may not.
It may just be a batch file.


> > I know that recent Word can do its own export directly to 
> PDF but thus far
> > I've been unable to get a script working to do this so 
> we're sticking with
> > this method.
> 
> We actually work in Word. Part of the publishing system is a custom
> XSLT transformation from the internal XML structure of Word files to
> DocBook XML. So our writers just check in their Word files and the
> system generates PDF and HTML directly from them.

Oh right.
That's a possibility, though I think I might prefer a one-off transformation from Word to DocBook, as I'd expect it'd need some fixing up.  And that would remove any possible expectation that what they've seen in Word would be exactly like what they'll get.


Uncertainly,
Richard.