I spent some time this afternoon writing some content in DocBook format using a tool called XMLmind XML Editor. I am using the free Personal Edition. I like the editor, it was quick to learn and works as advertized. After writing a couple pages I decided to see how it looked as a PDF file.
It turns out that turning DocBook into PDF isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I have yet to find a good solution. I may have to buy the full version of XMLeditor.
Mike, see if there is a XSLTransformer for Windows. (Assuming you are Windows centric, I’m Mac/Linux centric)
The DocBook is well published as you know, and being that’s XML there are many resources/ways to convert XML to PDF (or HTML or anything really) using XSL Transforms.
Find out more here: http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets
If all of that is too overwhelming and XMLMind does a good job at a reasonable price you may be more comfortable with that solution.
Furthermore…. I think OpenOffice 3.0 can read and write DocBook (just have to load a DocBook Style) and it has good PDF output capbabilities. Its Open Source/Free as well.
I run mostly Windows but use Linux as well. All of my early release WordPress testing (e.g. 3.0) is done on Linux. If you know of a good DocBook to PDF converter that runs under Linux, I am not adverse to going that router. When I generate the documentation for phpHtmlLib, I have to run it under Linux so I am already doing something similar.
On linux xsltproc is usually installed by default in most distributions. To get to PDF it looks like its at least a 2 stage process (but could be automated with a Makefile)
http://nwalsh.com/docbook/procdiagram/xmlpubxslt.png
@Mike Walsh
It turns out that under RedHat Linux, which is what I am running, there is a command called “xmlto” which takes a number of arguments, one of which is “pdf”. The result is a nice PDF file. I’ll continue to play with this but it looks like I have a solution.