Introduction to DocBook

Volume 8, Issue 135; 19 Oct 2005; last modified 08 Oct 2010

I recently gave an introductory DocBook presentation at the documentation and training conference in the Boston area. The slides from that talk are now available, if you're interested.

I'm never sure how useful slides are independent of the presentation that goes with them. Let me clarify, I'm never sure how useful my slides are independently. I know some folks manage to make slides that stand alone, and some folks don't.

In any event, yesterday I presented an Introduction to DocBook at the 6th annual Documentation and Training conference.

If you'd like to see the slides, they're online. <plug role="shameless">If you'd like to participate in a substantially longer version of that talk, there's still time to sign up for my tutorial on the same theme at XML 2005</plug>.

Comments

Hi Norm, I see that slides were generated using quite nice stylesheet customization. Do you think that you share this customization?

—Posted by Jirka Kosek on 20 Oct 2005 @ 07:09 UTC #

The one for the PDF, or the one for the flat HTML? I guess the answer is yes, in either case, though I probably shouldn't distribute my Sun template with the exact graphics and color choices :-)

—Posted by Norman Walsh on 20 Oct 2005 @ 12:27 UTC #

I'm more interested in PDF one (I already done flat HTML slides customization for myself several years ago). I'm more interested in overall design of such customization, not in Sun corporate graphic style :-)

—Posted by Jirka Kosek on 24 Oct 2005 @ 04:47 UTC #

For everyone who is building customization layers for the DocBook-XSL-Stylesheet this book is a must have

—Posted by Stephanie_B on 29 Oct 2005 @ 08:51 UTC #

My main complaint about DocBook is the sheer number of elements, most of which you will never use. You Norman has created a Simplified DocBook DTD, but it doesn't do books. What I want is a book-oriented DocBook DTD that doesn't include stuff for man pages, BNF grammars, class library references, etc. It will be nice when DocBook is permanently converted to XML Schema and we can just override the parts we don't want.

—Posted by John Beale on 30 Oct 2005 @ 09:47 UTC #

Customizing the RELAX NG Grammar to produce a "Small DocBook" that has fewer elements but still allows <book> is pretty easy. I hacked one together in 10 minutes or so. I'll post it sometime this week.

—Posted by Norman Walsh on 30 Oct 2005 @ 08:27 UTC #