The OASIS DocBook TC approved the release of DocBook v4.4 as a Committee Draft this week!

The next step is to go for OASIS Standard, but I imagine that process will take longer than the Committee releasing DocBook v5.0...

You can see the specifics on Norm's blog: http://norman.walsh.name/2005/01/28/docbook44 , read the specification at: http://www.docbook.org/specs/cd-docbook-docbook-4.4.html and get the schemas at: http://www.docbook.org.

Enjoy!

Laurent Godard announced on the docbook-apps list about the freely-available ooo2dbk tool to transform OpenOffice.org documents to DocBook:

ooo2dbk is a tool allowing the transformation of OpenOffice.org documents to docbook. Based on Eric Bellot's work, it has been widely extended and allow enhanced export

http://indesko.com/sites/en/downloads/ooo2dbk___generating/view

Supporting XML docBook V4.3, it allows to generate both article and book documents A lot of features are available such as handling preface and appendix elements, metadatas as OOo user fields also

ooo2dbk is an independant script allowing then batch processing of OpenOffice.org documents

I contributed some code to the xmerge project a few years ago, but haven't had time to play with it for a while. It would be interesting to see where the filter is at now, and contrast it with the ooo2dbk tool...

Norm Walsh has published a new DocBook NG release: "Hard Cider"

DocBook NG is a preview of DocBook V5.0 using the RelaxNG schema.

Details are available at http://norman.walsh.name/2005/01/18/hardcider and the schema is available at http://docbook.org/docbook-ng/hardcider/index.html.

Norm has also created a DTD version so folks with DTD-based validating editors can try it out.

From Norm's post:

In addition to the DTD, there are a number user-visible changes in the “Hard Cider” release:

• Allow <colophon> at the end of an <article>, RFE #1070458.

• Allow navigation components (<index>, <glossary>, etc.) at the end of sections.

• Allow xml:space (with the value “preserve”) on verbatim environments.

• Make <revnumber> optional in <revision>, RFE #1055480.

• Added “protocol” to the list of class values on <systemitem>.

• Add <citation> and <citetitle> to <attribution>.

• Added <alt> and <annotation>.

• Added rowheader to <table> and <informaltable>.

• Made <title> required on <preface>. It always should have been.

• Added <contractsponsor>, <contractnum>, and <mediaobject> to the content of <info>.

• Allow text where a proper date used to be required (<pubdate> and friends).

• Allow endterm on <link>.

• Allow <refsection> as a “start” element.

• Allow <initializer> in <paramdef>.

Most of these changes make DocBook NG more compatible with DocBook V4.x.

The Simplified DocBook NG release is still at the "Bourbon" version. I mentioned to Norm at XML 2004 that I'd like to take a stab at updating it, so I'll try to get some spare time to go and sample some Cider!

I'm very excited with the direction of DocBook v5.0 since it's using RelaxNG. The hard part is getting Relax NG adopted and supported out there. The best editor I've used with Relax NG support is Oxygen. Most of the projects I'm on are also "standardized" on W3C schema, so getting Relax NG accepted is a tough battle...