Re: [docbook-apps] Docbook for industrial usage

[Ruediger Landmann <r.landmann@redhat.com>]

  On 09/07/2010 07:45 PM, Sabine Cretella wrote:
> 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.

In Red Hat and the Fedora Project, we produce all of our documentation 
in Docbook:

http://docs.redhat.com

http://docs.fedoraproject.org

We transform the XML into single-page HTML, multi-page HTML, PDF, and 
EPUB using Publican, a tool developed in-house and released as free, 
open-source software: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Site_Tech.html

Red Hat manuals are published in those four formats in 22 languages, and 
the Fedora project publishes a smaller selection of manuals in anywhere 
up to 42 languages. Authoring in DocBook as opposed to a word processor 
allows us to maintain a single source for each document, regardless of 
how many different formats and languages we publish.

One of my colleagues, Ryan Lerch, explained the "why" in a short comic: 
http://fossdocs.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/what_is_publican.png

Although it's Publican-centric, the reasoning applies to DocBook more 
generally, regardless of the tool you use.

> 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.

In Publican, it would be (for example):

publican build --formats=pdf --languages=en-US

You can find the spec file and source tarball here (the current version 
is 2.1): https://fedorahosted.org/releases/p/u/publican/

The spec file is designed for Fedora, and would need some adaptation for 
openSUSE to account for different packaging for dependencies. If you get 
Publican working on openSUSE, we'd be happy to add installation 
instructions to our documentation.

Cheers
Rudi