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

[Richard Hamilton <hamilton@xmlpress.net>]

Hi Katie,

My company uses DocBook for most of its publications (we publish books for technical communicators, content strategists, and others in the technical communication world). We publish in print and ebook form (which is essentially HTML). We also publish excerpts in HTML. 

Here is a link to a sample we posted in 2010 that has ePub, Mobi, and PDF: http://xmlpress.net/2009/12/20/free-ebook-sample-chapter-managing-writers/

Here is a more recent example in HTML and PDF: http://thecontentwrangler.com/2014/12/03/the-role-of-content-inventory-and-audit-in-governance/

The chapter in HTML format is the main part of this page, but there's a link to the PDF here: https://www.slideshare.net/abelsp/sample-chapter-content-audits-and-inventories

We do use other formats from time to time (e.g., DITA for a series about DITA and Author-It for a book about Author-It), but the bulk of our books are in DocBook and generated from a single source.

DocBook works well for us, though I would concur with others on this thread that there is a learning curve. But if you're going to use XML, I don't think you will find the learning curve for any of the major dialects (DITA, DocBook, S1000D) to be significantly different from the others, as long as you have good tools and good training.

Best regards,
Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
http://xmlpress.net
hamilton@xmlpress.net



On Sep 11, 2015, at 9:56, 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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