Hi Robert, I would use Latex If I was publishing something. It is a very well known typesetting tool in the Publishing Industry. Jeff From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca> To: "Ottawa Linux Users Group" <linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 7:08:34 AM Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] anyone out there using a production publishing toolchain? is anyone out there using a (preferably xml/docbook-based) publishing toolchain for publishing books, manuals or courseware that runs on Linux? i've got a number of old courses, and more i want to write, and i want to update my publishing toolchain. that i want to use some form of xml/docbook is pretty much a no-brainer since that will give me the most flexibility in terms of output rendering, but there are a number of choices even there, so i was wondering if anyone on this list is using some type of toolchain like that for regular production use at their place. the first option is to use straight docbook, which will definitely work but is kind of verbose since you typically need to type in those overly long tags. one variation on that is that, way back when, i wrote a pre-docbook processing step that used an XSLT processor (xsltproc) that let me add a bunch of specific shorter tags (like <p> -> <para> and so on), then i ran *my* original content through what's called an "identity transform" that simply replaced my shortcuts with the proper docbook tags. (and, no, it's not as simple as you think.) so that gave me the ability to use proper docbook but save a lot of typing by sneaking in my handy little transform at the beginning. yet another option is publican -- https://fedorahosted.org/publican/ -- which is a packaged docbook/xml toolchain that lets you do neat things like branding your documents. so it hides a lot of the grunt work. i'm just checking it out, and if anyone else is using it, i'd be interested in knowing what you think of it. the final option that i just ran across is "slacker's docbook," http://slackerdoc.tigris.org/. i found this only because i just finished pre-pub reviewing the next edition of this book: http://www.amazon.ca/Introduction-Design-Patterns-Qt/dp/0131879057/ and noticed that the authors stated they'd written the whole thing using that reduced form of docbook, which conveniently adds a whole bunch of time-saving features that are normally a bit of a pain with regular docbook. so that's now an option as well. so ... any opinions? rday p.s. i could almost make a talk out of this, couldn't i? :-) -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ======================================================================== _______________________________________________ Linux mailing list Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux