Related Entries

Quick Ref: SVN command line
Git with Dropbox
Cisco's new urbanism
Portable development links
Wish I had this 10 years ago

« Dealing with a difficult boss
» Joy of Python: Setting Goals

A stylesheet for O'Reilly authors

Documentation authors, think outside the "Word"!

Micah Dubinko: “There’s always Word”. But if the thought of writing an entire book in Word hurts your head as much as it does mine, there’s always XML. Specifically, there’s DocBook Lite, or "dblite", which is a preferred XML format at O'Reilly, and perhaps other publishers.

He recommends using Softquad XMetal. This is something I need to explore. DocBook is a great format, but it is a royal pain - even with VI or Emacs - to actually write documents. If there is a good editor, then I think document authors might actually use it more.

This is much more beneficial than using Word and then converting these to PDF. Both Word and PDF are binary formats. Conversion from these to other formats is not easy. With DocBook, it is a simple matter of writing an XSL to transform to other formats. And the distribution already comes with XSL for most commonly found formats.

//-->