Re: [docbook-apps] Need recommendations for the best modern Linuxbackend tools for DocBook

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

On 11/20/2010 11:18 AM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> The PLplot project has been using DocBook XML for years, but our
> choice of backend tools was made a decade ago so presumably some of
> those backend tools have been superseded by better choices now.  Thus,
> I would appreciate your recommendations concerning the best such tools
> (for a Linux platform).

At Red Hat, we use a tool we developed in-house, called Publican.[1] 
It's free and open-source (of course!) and we ship it for Fedora and Red 
Hat Enterprise Linux 6. It's also shipped in Ubuntu as of Karmic. If you 
build it for another distro, please let us know and we'll be happy to 
mention it in the Publican documentation.

>
> Here is what we currently use:
>
> 1.  man pages.

Man page output is a relatively new feature in Publican, and is probably 
still buggy. We're keen to get this working properly, so if you give 
Publican a try, please file bugs if things don't work as expected :)

> 2. info pages. 
> 4. dvi file 
> 5. PostScript file

We don't currently output these formats, but might consider them -- you 
could ask on the Publican mailing list.[2]

>
> 3. web pages.
>
> 6. pdf file

Single-page HTML, multi-page HTML, and PDF are Publican's core formats. 
All the docs on http://docs.redhat.com and http://docs.fedoraproject.org 
were created and published with Publican. Additionally, Publican built 
and maintains the website structure.

We also output EPUB, Eclipse, and plain text formats.

>   I have
> recently noticed that openjade (for our particular command-line
> arguments at least) chokes on UTF-8 in the DocBook source.

We support UTF-8 in our XML; Publican is designed to work in an 
environment were docs are routinely translated, so this was really a must :)

Cheers
Rudi

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/publican/
[2] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/publican-list