Re: [docbook-apps] Show off what you've done with Docbook

[Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2015, Katie Welles wrote:

> Gerard's points 1 and 2 are quite valid.
>
> Setting up my DocBook toolchain was quite the graduate course in frustration. I wrote up notes about how I set it up here: http://www.millermattson.com/blog/docbook-toolchain/, mostly
> so I could do it again years later after forgetting! 

That can be simplified with packaging systems.  What packaged DocBook 
system there is for Windows, though, I don't know.  In the FDP Primer 
quick start, installing the toolchain is only one step.

> I still say that the power of DocBook is not in its ability to create documents, but in its ability to output a document **and** HTML from the same source. But when 
> i worked with it, we only generated HTML. And for all the monumental hassle of dealing with the toolchain + tortuously laboring in the XSLT, to just get a simple HTML site at the end
> was sad: I could have created something so much nicer in just straight HTML +CSS!

AsciiDoc does both HTML and PDF.  Of course, it uses DocBook underneath, 
but it is utterly unlike DocBook.  It is presentation markup, as opposed 
to semantic.  Complex, longer documents can take advantage of DocBook's 
semantic markup.  For shorter documents, it is sometimes just 
unnecessary complexity.  But there are a lot of examples where mixing 
content and presentation was a mistake.