AW: [docbook-apps] Tools to make DocBook easier

["Kallauch, Benjamin (EEIN)" <benjamin.kallauch2@volkswagen.de>]

Dear all,

in the past few months I established a small and ordinary tool chain with XMLSpy, XSLT and FOP. Setting up the tool chain (on Windows) was not too hard, although I had also some difficulties. But at the "end" I wouldn't call this a torture. I customized pretty much in the XSL-Stylesheets by now to get our CI running. Therefore I had a lot of (mental) work in following the logical chains within the myriads of templates, parameters and so on. That was somewhat painful and I tried some times to understand the stylesheet structures with flow diagrams on paper.

I appreciate the great work by Bob with his book to let us understand the stylesheets better. Nevertheless I wish I had something like a graphical representation of the stylesheet structure, i.e. by means of block/flow diagrams. I am even not sure if this was possible to do or demanded by the majority. Reason for my concern is that one will get an overview with time and things become clear after a while automatically. And for most technical writers customization is only one early step, which is done only once at the beginning of a project.

Another point of view is profiling. I use profiling very extensively at the moment. Today, as the number of XML files increased and content grew, I am faced with (content) complexity management, version/revision control and referencing (XIncludes). For those three points I have strong personal demand for some kind of CMS. Hints are very welcome from those who have already DB specific CMS in use. Maybe it's time for me to create my own Eclipse based tool to handle those points. But maybe there already are plugins for that.

regards,
Ben