Docbook for industrial usage

[Sabine Cretella <s.cretella@gmail.com>]

Hi, yesterday I talked with Camille on IRC about getting docbook used more in industry. I am searching for companies that already use it and that could give a good example about what they do with docbook and why they use it. And I also got one first contact I am going to write to.

The reason is: I am originally a translator and did quite some manuals. I am just getting back into doing things (after a longer family pause = kids ;-) and noted that in almost 8 years nothing has changed: manuals are still written with wordprocessors, images are still modified applying texboxes. Formats during translation get lost and require a lot of post-editing. All this does not happen when the translation is, for example, carried out in docbook format. Besides just the layout questions there are also some more which are related terminology consistance and the overall quality of a manual. 

I hope that by getting together some real good usage examples in industry and writing an article about why to use docbook and not a word processor (getting this then to companies) we can at least make some more people aware of docbook. It would help all of us to do better jobs.

One side I never did myself, but would like to try out on my own is to convert a docbook file to pdf - all I found on the web seems to be rather old and from before docbook 5 - is there any new documentation on this? You know one thing is having just read it's possible and another is having it done at least once. (I am on OpenSuse btw.)

Thanks for any help :-)

Cheers, Bina