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Using the DocBook DTD for Internal Documents?
Saqib Ali asks: "These days, most of the Linux Documentation is created using DocBook DTD. I was wondering if it will be useful for a large Enterprise to create Internal IT documents using DocBook DTD. Any success stories where a large enterprise converted all of its internal IT documentation to DocBook, with management's support? Any other things/issues to keep in mind before embarking on such a mission?"
uses Cocoon2 as a web-publication engine. The Norm Walsh xslt sheets are your best general-purpose transformation, but they sometimes choke on Xalan. This Wiki Page should clear up that problem.
It was a nightmare.
Anyone who was not a programmer balked at the idea of having to write documentation in a (Gasp!) markup language. "Just give me Word!" they would whine.
There is a lot of overhead associated with DocBook that most non-technical people don't want to deal with. They want a WYSIWYG editor, and will cry, kick, scream, and intentionally be completely unproductive until they get it.
Essentially your choices are Adobe Framemaker (~$800), Lyx (Open Source) and XMLmind (Freeware). There may be some others, but these are the ones I've looked at. These are the ones you can use like a WYSIWYG, but are more WYSIWYM (What you see is what you mean). For more info on WYSIWYM, look at Lyx's site.
DocBook is a great spec, but the editors suck for the most part. Lyx can't import DocBook in reliably, and your Docbook is stored as a lyx file (latex I think). Lyx's Docbook stuff can be a bear to set up, even on a system like RedHat where most of the software comes installed. I only recommend Lyx to people who have experience with Lyx, to someone who just wants to write docs, it tends to be more trouble than it's worth.
Framemaker will probably do everything you want and be a godsend with lots of nice features, but you'll pay for it, $800 for Win/Mac and ~$1300 for Unix.
XMLmind is pretty cool, it does Docbook well but is a little slow, it has a little bit of a learning curve, but is prolly the best Docbook editor I've found for free. It's not Open Source though. It is written in Java, so you might have some speed issues, depending on the platform you run it on. I've been recommending XMLmind to everyone I know that asks about Docbook, it has a tree view of the DOM as well as a WYSIWYM view with stylesheets applied on the fly. It has property editors and a pretty smart insert tool that follows the DTD, only allowing you to insert allowed tags into other tags. It feels like more of a programmer's tool than Framemaker, but it should be fairly easy for most WYSIWYG users to adjust.
<rant>
I don't understand why on God's green earth OpenOffice or Abiword or KOffice, or anyone else in the OpenSource world has neglected this area. It's been three years since the LDP went to DocBook, GNOME uses DocBook as their doc format. Why in the hell don't we have decent document writing tools when everyone is always screaming about the lack of documentation in the OpenSource world?
If we want more docs written, it needs to be easier to write them and shouldn't involve learning all about SGML or XML engines as well as a markup language to do it. DocBook is too big to keep in my head and I shouldn't have to think hard about how to write docs when my focus is the content I want to write for. Organizing technical info on a difficult subject is hard enough, stopping every five minutes to look up a DocBook tag or trying to better understand the structure is a huge barrier to getting the work done.
</rant>
But that's just my $.02
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
There is also a Simplified DocBook DTD. We used it at my last job. It is a small but useful subset of DocBook that can get you started.
All Simplified DocBook files are also completely valid DocBook documents. But there are far fewer elements and constructs to keep in your head. It's also geared toward smaller items such as articles instead of complete books. At my company, we made a couple of template documents and then just had people fill in the blanks. People ended up working faster once we got them to stop worrying about formatting and styling (non-trivial).
Start writing in SD and as the collection of documents grows, you can look into combining them into a cohesive DocBook collection as time permits and your experience level grows.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.