Wilfred Thinking Aloud

DocBook saves the day

During the last 2.5 years, I have been writing all of my documents in DocBook. And boy, do I love it. I don't think many people with a software background really enjoy writing technical documentation; the good news is that with DocBook.... you are programming again. Yep, you heard that right: programming. Consider it to be the rescue plan for techies that need to write documents. (In fact, that's probably also the main reason why it is so succesful in the Linux/Gnome community.)

Don't get me wrong: you don't need to be a developer to use DocBook. Basically, the only thing that you really need is a text editor and a tool to convert you XML document into whatever format you like. If you feel like giving it a try, then you might find these pointers interesting:

• DocBook DTD and Documentation
• DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/

If you're planning to use a tool like XMLmind's FO Converter, then you don't even need to care about the stylesheets. This tool has it all. In that case, you might also like XMLmind's XML Editor. Both tools have a free edition. In that case, you get a tool that looks like this:

But the really cool thing of DocBook is of course, that it is so incredibly easy to generate documentation. That means that you can limit yourself to the barely sufficient, and have anything else generated for you. Whow. It's basically just hacking an XSLT stylesheet together and you're done. The only penalty is that you need to learn XSLT, but then again, who doesn't need to know at least something of XSLT in these days, so you might as well consider it a reward instead of a penalty.