General Consideration about DocBook

A tiny introduction to DocBook

DocBook is just a XML language, it is defined using a Relax NG Schema. The main purpose of DocBook is to let people write document using only semantical description. Actually the semantic defined in DocBook is more dedicated to contents related to computer science, but it can be used for a wide range of application.

The principle of DocBook is to write a document using the XML syntax (or use a authoring tool to help you to write such of document). Then you can process the document into another format. The usual solution is to output HTML with any XSLT processor and the given XSLT style-sheets provided by DocBook.

Another widely use solution is to process the DocBook into XSL-FO, and then use it to produce a top-quality pdf (pretty close to the quality you can have from a LaTeX document).

Why a DocBook converter?

The following DocBook converter can as well convert existing DocBook document into the internal DOM Tree representation, or output DocBook from existing item in the wiki. So user are able to transform the content of their wiki into another format (typically PDF, or specific HTML). But at the same time, they are able to collaboratively work on DocBook document.

For instance projectst like The Linux Documentation Project use DocBook to write documentation, and MoinMoin. They will be able to directly collaborate on DocBook document from MoinMoin. More generally, we can imagine that people will use MoinMoin to work on DocBook document, and so can get rid off the annoying versioning system. Indeed, currently the most common way for project with documentation or book wrote with DocBook is to have the XML files stored on a (D)CVS system. With MoinMoin, they could be able to work on these files directly in a WebBrowser, which can be much more efficient and comfortable (especially for correcter who are not always confident with (D)CVS).

The general philosophy of the converter

The internal DOM Tree representation does not use semantic. So when we convert from a DocBook document, we need to define a style for each elements (and display everything). And when we will convert to we will only use the formatting elements of DocBook, and almost no semantic.

So never the converter will be a good solution to process DocBook document, and it is not his goal. However it can help you to display "draft" of a DocBook document easily, and can also help you to convert wiki item into other format using DocBook as an intermediate step in the conversion. (Especially it is easy to process odt, tex, pdf ... from a DocBook).

Documentation

DocBook ⇒ DOM

See the documentation specific to this converter DOM DocBook and HTML 2010/DocBook-DOM

DOM ⇒ DocBook

See the documentation specific to this converter DOM DocBook and HTML 2010/DOM-DocBook