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Subject: RE: DOCBOOK: Choice of environment for working with Docbook?
Jean, Summary: I recommend you use XML rather than SGML version of DocBook for your needs. I do recommend you use DocBook. Depending on your documentation needs, you may need to create a subset or extension of DocBook. Epic is the best choice. Period. You need not purchase their DocBook Application--you can create your own. If you are familiar with SGML/XML markup, FOSIs and DSSSL, it will cost you very much less than 15000 Euros to set up. If these acronyms sound like a foreign language to you, it is probably worth spending the 15k. I personally feel that 15k is too expensive for what you get. After spending 4000 Euros on Epic Publisher, you kind of expect the DocBook application to be thrown into the package too... Details: I have taken three companies from Word to *ML, the last of which was to XML. All 3 cases were for technical documentation departments. Company A is a leading telecommunications company, with a documentation team of 12. I set up their entire SGML application suite, which includes ADEPT Editor for authoring, ADEPT Publisher for printing, DynaText for online delivery on CD and DynaWeb for web delivery. They use a proprietary DTD, though structurally it has a lot in common with DocBook. Company B had a very small budget, so we used WordPerfect9 for authoring and publish via Jade and DSSSL stylesheets. I developed a DocBook extension for them. The main reason for using SGML was because they required single sourcing to produce different versions of the document using conditional processing. This processing was impossible to set up using VBA. Company C is where I currently work. We now use DocBook 4 (beta) and Epic 3 Publisher. I have set up authoring and publishing using my own FOSIs and DSSSL stylesheets. I am still fine tuning the web publishing function. I have knocked the socks off my senior management by delivering in several formats from a single source, in less time it used to take them to prepare only printed versions from Word. And the quality provided by Epic for both print and HTML is far superior to Word. I often use Omnimark to produce HTML where I need fine control of the output. I also use Omnimark to convert from Word to XML. For your purposes, one or more copies of Epic Publisher and Epic Editor for the rest is all you need (provided you already have Adobe Acrobat installed on the Publisher computers). You certainly can train Word people to work with Epic. I suggest you use a qualified Arbortext trainer for this. Some Word users will move easily to Epic, while others will require hand-holding. Have patience. All Word users eventually learn to think in terms of "writing structured content" instead of "presenting some content in a particular format". Some Word users like to see what it "looks" like, long after they have converted to Epic. Your initial authoring FOSI is very important here. It must display the information in a format similar to your primary output format. Most of our writers found it difficult to go back to work in Word after one month of "structured authoring". I personally maintain that authoring and publishing in Epic is 4 X faster than doing the equivalent in Word, and the quality of the results is far superior. Even Word lovers eventually admit that they write twice as much content now than they used to in Word. I probably should not say this too loud, but I have been able to shrink the size of documentation teams to 1/3 their original size and still output more than the original team was producing using Word. I have never used this to sell structured authoring to anyone, but it proves itself true after a while, and it makes the investment in moving to structured authoring even more worthwhile for the company. Please note that I do not in any way work for Arbortext. I am just a satisfied customer, who has tried virtually every SMGL/XML authoring and publishing tool that exists. Er, I also use emacs, but I have not been able to convince any company to force their technical writers to use it ;-) I hope this helps. Gershon. -----Original Message----- From: owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org]On Behalf Of Jean Jordaan Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2000 6:06 PM To: Docbook (E-mail) Subject: DOCBOOK: Choice of environment for working with Docbook? Dear Norm, and all This mail is a request for advice: what software do you use to author Docbook? ...
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