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Main | Next day (May 11, 2004) »

Monday May 10, 2004

Weblog to DocBook.

Comments[6] by Dave in Blogging

I was seriously considering using DocBook for a big writing project. I backed out because my collaborators use the reviewer comment features of MS Word, but even if my collaborators could have accepted DocBook I'm not sure that I could have done so. DocBook is complex and climbing a big learning curve when I should be writing and working on example code does not appeal to me at all. Take a look at the XML files and the build scripts for Mark Pilgrim's DocBook-based Dive into Python if you don't believe me. I get the feeling that a DocBook project is a lot like a software project with a build-script and build-time error messages that require debugging. I don't want to miss a deadline because my manuscript won't compile.

The best way to work with DocBook would probably be a WYSIWYG editor that uses DocBook as it's native format or that can export in DocBook format. Otherwise, you'll be swimming in angle-brackets and cursing validation errors. DocBook provides a powerful set of tools, but DocBook XML is something that should be generated rather than written by hand.

Along those lines: what if you wanted to print your entire Weblog, including all of the entries in your archive, as a nicely formatted book, ready for printing. DocBook would be a great way to do that. You could write a utility to dump your Weblog to DocBook XML format and, if you've been writing your Weblog entries in valid XHTML, you could even transform the formatting information in your entries to DocBook XML. Then, you could easily transform your entire Weblog to PDF, RTF, or any of the dozens of formats supported by the DocBook transforms. Weblog to DocBook - has anybody tried that before?

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