DOCBOOK: General roadmap questions

[Wolfgang Laun <Wolfgang.Laun@alcatel.at>]

Hello Group,

Our situation: ~60 engineers, UNIX/Solaris for SW development,
Personal workstations running NT and (a few, but growing) Linux.

During past years we've been using Digital Runoff, DecWrite, Interleaf
and now MS-Word for technical documentation, and things have not really
improved. For instance, automatic generation of documents has not been
made easier, and only a few doc's written in LaTeX have lasted over the
years without conversion.

Recently I've come across the DocBook, and I think SGML/XML would be an
excellent choice for (at least) our generated documents. If we can
give something to the WISYWIG adepts, we might even get rid of MS-Word.
(The emacs SGML mode may even be sufficient for most of our tecchies.)

Now my questions:
- What would be the best way for producing hardcopy? (I understand that
  rtf is an out-of-the-box result of applying jade, but what's the best
  way (w/o starting MS-Word) of getting PostScript from that?
  Star Office (with a simple example) works OK, but we need to do this
from
  a script, in the background. Is TeX the best way? Is there a way via
  rtf to pdf/Acrobat?)

- For hardcopy, we'll have to modify the stylesheets to include our
  custom page headers and footers. (Is that correct?) Generally: Is
  DSSSL ("never achieved widespread use") the best bet, or should we
  rather use CSS? XSL??

- Scheme: Are there any substantial differences to (e)lisp? I haven't
found
  any documentation on Scheme (but I admit I didn't try hard).

- It doesn't all have to be free. We're also investigating commercial
  products. Any experiences?

Thank you,
-Wolfgang