[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: good "book" format for html? -- DocBook is more simple, more universal

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 20:08, Brian wrote:
> As of a few years ago, DocBook was nothing close to being "cake to
> piece together."  Is there a unified DocBook distribution of utilities
> now that actually work together?

I've been using the DocBook tools that have come with Red Hat community
distributions for 5+ years.

I also convert to/from LaTeX so I can edit WYSIWYM in LyX.

> Early attempts to get DocBook up and running were simply not worth
> the effort required.

I don't pretend to be a DocBook guru.  But several of my colleagues use
it exclusively.

The original poster (and correct me if I am wrong) seem interested in
building a parser around a simplistic and universal language for books. 
DocBook is definitely far more appropriate markup than HTML for this. 
At least it already has quite a bit of work already done on it, and you
can convert between it and countless other editing/publication formats.

Although did say in my last post that he was free to modify HTML to suit
his needs.  In fact, I wanted to clarify that I would _never_ wish to
squash someone else's ideas.  Hence why I thought modifying HTML to his
needs (into a new XML instance) might be the direction he might want to
go.

I like DocBook because I can apply countless formats to it -- single
HTML file, multiple HTML files with a TOC, framed HTML, various PDF
(typically via TeX conversion first), etc... -- all on a whim from a
_single_ sourcefile.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                    b.j.smith at ieee.org 
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