Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Publication Strategy

Bennett Atkinson wrote:

> I am a new OASIS member and need to find a better publication strategy.
> Currently, I write aircraft manuals via the Air Transport Association SGML
> Standards (ATA 2200) and have been using Docbook as an publication outline
> to develop my documents for electronic text. My system consists of writing
> the manuals in FM+SGML (Windows 2000) and then exporting them to SGML. I do
> a quick transformation from SGML into XML (via editing in Notepad) and use

You can use sx program from James Clark to get XML from SGML
automatically.

> XSL (based on the Docbook XSL) to style the document into HTML. The system
> is very primitive (albeit very inexpensive) but it limits my ability to
> reach my goal. Can anyone suggest any alternate methods? Also, the graphics
> are done in TIFF/CGM format then translated to JPG? Is SVG better?

You should use PNG or GIF as replacement of TIFF as JPEG can distort
image little bit as it uses loose-compression. You can use SVG if you
are sure that all of your users have SVG plugin installed.
 
> My goal is to provide searchable, interactive manuals in which the user can
> easily navigate and if so desired export to various formats (pdf, word, rtf,

HTML Help and JavaHelp provide full-text search capabilities and easy
navigation. They can be generated using standard DocBook XSL stylesheets
and freely available tools from MS or Sun.

> etc.) for downloading and printing. Unfortunately, I have no budget so I
> cannot purchase any proprietary applications.

You can get reasonable RTF and PDF using Jade and DSSSL stylesheets.

				Jirka

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  Jirka Kosek  	                     
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