Comments on: LaTex vs DocBook

By: osun

osun — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:58:26 +0000

I googled “latex vs docbook”, and got this post as the first result. I love LaTex too. I noticed you’ve published some books with O’reilly, but on O’reilly’s pages for authors, I could only find their templates for msword and docbook, and on http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/ch02.html they say LaTex is in the “strongly discouraged” list. Could I ask did you provide your book to O’reilly in LaTex format?

By: Lon

Lon — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:10:58 +0000

By now I guess perhaps you've discovered dblatex...? DocBook to LaTeX to PDF.

By: Online LaTeX « The Lumber Room

Online LaTeX « The Lumber Room — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:35:30 +0000

[...] docbook? tex4ht? [...]

By: Chad’s dailies » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-03

Chad’s dailies » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-03 — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:46:12 +0000

[...] LaTex vs DocBook (tags: docbook latex tools) [...]

By: John

John — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 05:28:39 +0000

Tom, I’ve used Texinfo too. It’s like a slimmed down LaTeX (except it uses ‘@’ signs instead of backslashes). I like it, though if you are documenting something with a lot of ‘@’ signs in it (like Perl or Ruby code, for example), I guess it could be slightly annoying at times. It’s still actively maintained, which is nice.

I’m not crazy about the info tool, but I really like the pdf/dvi output from Texinfo (since it’s TeX-generated). The html output is plenty handy too (though, haven’t tried it with actual mathematics yet ).

It’s always surprised me that there’s not really a *standard* latex-to-html tool out there. It seems like such a no-brainer that that’s really what the LaTeX community needs. Last time I checked, the latex2html project seemed to have pretty much stalled out (also had trouble building it on my system), and Tex4ht’s generating html from dvi seems kinda wacky to me (though I know next to nothing about dvi’s internal format).

One thing coming down the pike that looks pretty interesting to me is Perl 6′s Pod. The spec is nearing completion, and, for now, can be found [here](http://svn.openfoundry.org/pugs/docs/Perl6/Spec/Documentation.pod). Could be a very nice general doc format, even if you’re not interested in Perl.

By: Tom Emerson

Tom Emerson — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:01:44 +0000

Don’t forget the old standby TexInfo — products decent PDF documentation (via TeX), HTML, and probably multitudinous other formats.

By: bos

bos — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:04:23 +0000

Chris, yes, I’ve used AsciiDoc, though not on especially large projects. It’s nice for writing man pages and the like (that’s about the extent of my experience), and the toolset around it is good.

By: bos

bos — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:02:23 +0000

Lars, I noticed after using Tex4ht for a while that it could apparently generate DocBook XML. So it is at least theoretically possible that if you like LaTeX (I don’t know if you do), you could work in LaTeX while providing data to your clients in their preferred format.

By: Chris Double

Chris Double — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:33:51 +0000

Have you looked at AsciiDoc?

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

It can produce nice HTML and PDF files. There’s a docbook backend and a latex backend.

By: larsivi

larsivi — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:23:23 +0000

I’m working with getting DocBook in as the documentation format for my current client. LaTex wasn’t really an option, as they’re very familiar with XML from other projects. I also find that even though XSL-FO is rather complex, the neatness of the docbook-xsl set will allow for very powerful possibilities, customizing output for client’s clients, etc.

The docbook-xsl set itself is big, but clean, and I’ve found the http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ book to be invaluable in setting up customized style sheets. I’m also considering how additional attribute usage (there are a couple in the DocBook spec that you’re free to “interpret” yourself), can be used to create more dynamic webpages, especially for software documentation that might be different for users of different platforms. Thus a user might log in, say his preference is MacOSX docs, and the stylesheets filters out what is not necessary. Note that this process is probably too heavy to have fully dynamic, but it can be used to create seemingly dynamic doc content.

XMLmind is a neat freeware editor that lets you write WYSIWYG, but without letting you forget that you’re really editing XML. I have tried different options just to get a feel of what is best; OpenOffice can save as DocBook, and this is an ok’ish solution for the first draft. It is not perfect though, as it drops quite a bit of formatting which needs to be added to the XML afterwards. For this I tend to use Vim. I believe the XML additions lets you do validating editing, but it is reported to conflict with some docbook specific scripts I’ve been using. I like the WYSIWYG part of XMLmind, but for larger edits and changes to tags, something else is needed, read: vim.