Please note: This documentation is very dated and should be treated as an old draft. Among the major updates as of 8/2005 are a jump from version .6 to .8, the renaming of staging to launcher.

Appendix D. Working With DocBook

Table of Contents

Introduction
Required Materials for Writing and Editing a DocBook XML Document
Installation-less Remote DocBook Transformations
Minimal Installation for Local DocBook Transformations
Setting up a Complete, Local DocBook Toolchain
Working with the Toolchain
GUIs and Scripts
Useful References

Introduction

DocBook is essentially a production tool for writing structured documents using SGML and XML, providing the elements needed for technical documentation. A DocBook document can be converted to many formats, HTML, PDF, RTF, PS and more. However, documentation for setting up DocBook on Mac OS X is almost nonexistent. Even the O'Reilly The Definitive Guide to DocBook spends all of 6 out of 650 pages detailing how to install a DocBook toolchain on UNIX and Windows. Although it turns out that there are many ways to get DocBook going on Mac OS X, what follows is a summary of a couple of the simplest techniques with some of the least buggy tools.