XML Pipelines: A Guide to XProc

After I wrote Making TeX Work, I wondered if I'd ever write another book. The effort required to get from a seventy page draft to a finished book was much larger, and harder, than I imagined.

Then I wrote DocBook: The Definitive Guide, and could honestly claim not to be a one-hit wonder in publishing. O'Reilly's even publishing the second edition, covering DocBook V5.0!

I really wasn't sure I'd ever write a third book. But XProc looks to be ramping up in the world, and Richard Hamilton’s been giving me little nudges to write one for his XML Press. Sometime over the last couple of months, the possible thought of maybe doing that turned into a few pages of outline then a few dozen reference pages then a nice (XProc-based!) toolchain for building it.

I guess I'm writing another book.

You can follow along, if you're so inclined, at http://xprocbook.com/. That's pretty rough and it's early days. There's no actual text up there yet, but that's got more to do with laziness on my part than anything else.

For my first two books, O'Reilly's art department provided the cover design and all the details. For this one, more of it's on my plate. So here's my first idea: crowd-source the cover. If you've got an image (of your own, naturally) or other design that you think would make a good cover, please let me know. You'll get a cover credit and my gratitude if we pick your design for the final cover!