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

[Gerard Nicol <gerard.nicol@gazillabyte.com>]

I'm surprised nobody has put together a Linux VM image with Git and Docbook etc. 

The reason people fork out $2000 plus for RoboHelp is that it kind of works out of the box. 

I'd happily pay a few thousand a year for a subscription to a hosted or packaged Docbook environment if the results looked as good as some of the better examples provided. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 12, 2015, at 11:26 AM, natk <nkershaw@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree that the power of docbook is in its ability to generate multiple formats.

At my last position I generated single and multi-page HTML and PDF for a multi-product, multi-version docset. (I'm sorry, I'm not able to provide a public URL here).

It did involve a fair amount of work, and I agree that when there is an issue it can be complicated to track down and fix. The bits I found particularly tricky were wrapping text (in tables mainly) so that the PDF text stayed inside its margins, and the PDF cross-references. Can go into some more detail on this if you like.

Bob's book and the support on these lists is awesome though - and there wasn't a problem that I couldn't eventually fix.

I would also +1 the advantages of having a tool-chain that can be incorporated into CI. We used svn/maven/docbkx-tools/jenkins plus some other in-house tools.

Nat 

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 9:56 AM, Katie Welles <katie@inkwelle.com> wrote:

It’s been a while since I’ve used Docbook or participated in this forum.

I used Docbook a number of years ago to put together a web-based API reference system. To be frank, I found it to be a pretty painful project, but mainly because I thought it was downright foolish to jump through all those Docbook hoops just to output simple HTML. It seems to me that the power of Docbook is when your single XML source is used for multiple outputs.

I support a consortium that manages 12+ open APIs, and we’ve been re-examining the tools we use to output published specs. We know we want **all** our API specs to be available as PDF and also HTML, but are not sure which tool to bank on. So far we’ve been looking at asciidoc, which I find pretty underwhelming.

Have any of you PDF + HTML output with Docbook? If anyone has such a project and will be willing to show it off, send some URLs!

As an aside: Have any of you used asciidoc?

(BTW — I use MadCap Flare for another of my clients. The output is stunningly beautiful, but the tool is far too unwieldy and expensive for me to be able to recommend it to my API client.)
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