These days I’m very busy writing a 150 pages document about ONess to be presented at the University of A Coruña (Spain). This doc is written in spanish and documents all the development process (eXtreme Programming based) of the ONess project till now.
I finally decided to use docbook as I found XMLMind editor (thanks Ben) that helps a lot writing docbook xml. I used Latex in previous projects but I don’t like it too much and xml is powerful and easier to transform.
To transform docbook xml to pdf I use a modified version of the maven sdocbook plugin. I also use a custom stylesheet to set fo parameters based on the one from Spring distribution, based in turn on the Hibernate one (thanks again Ben). Now I get a pretty pdf with correct margins, line spacing,…
I think it’s time to join efforts and create a maven plugin to generate pdf and html output from docbook so contributions are welcome.
Carlos Sanchez's Weblog 
Thanks, I’ve been writing the documentation for Aurora MVC (www.auroramvc.org) in docbook using the exact same approach and have been using EditPlus because everything else is too restrictive or slow (like xmlspy for example). I’m downloading this editor now. Perhaps it makes it easier.
I use my own maven plugin. Download at http://www.1x4x9.info. Everything there (html, pdf, chm) except the home page was generated with that plugin and xmlmind. It has a few bugs I fixed at home, (I have to upload those). Not great but useful.
I«m suffering to produce the documentation of my project and I«m still looking for a stable solution to use Docbook and Maven.
I will try your plugin.
A question: it has multiproject support ?
I have several sub-projec and I want to create a docbook directory in each one. And then I«m dreaming to write ‘maven multiproject:docbook’ and watch all documentation being transformed in the respective dub-dirs 🙂 is it possible ?
best regards,
Felipe Gaścho
Schoolbus Project
https://schoolbus.dev.java.net
You can use “maven -Dgoal=docbook multiproject:goal” and it will run the docbook goal in all teh subprojects
I«m trying to use your tips to produce my docbooks artifacts but it still messy for me.
the bellow postGoal just download the xls and then to create the folders. But, how can I create the documentation ?
Using previusly unzipped docbook files
You can get the pdf and html from docbook if you get the sdocbook plugin and run “maven sdocbook”.
You don’t need to use my postgoal, only if you want to customise the output, as done in the acegi project, you can check it at http://acegisecurity.sourceforge.net/
ok, thank you for your patient.. but the problem is: I can«t figure out how to generate the PDF and Html output through sdocbook plugin.. can you give some functional example?
Actually I«m using an old ant task to produce the documentation. It is running well, but I want to migrate to maven. And I want to use the latest version of the docbook xls too – if possible 🙂
can you give me a project.xml and maven.xml minimum required to produce an PDF using some docbook sources and the sdocbook plugin ?
best regards,
Felipe Gaścho
ok, thank you for your patient.. but the problem is: I can«t figure out how to generate the PDF and Html output through sdocbook plugin.. can you give some functional example?
Actually I«m using an old ant task to produce the documentation. It is running well, but I want to migrate to maven. And I want to use the latest version of the docbook xls too – if possible 🙂
can you give me a project.xml and maven.xml minimum required to produce an PDF using some docbook sources and the sdocbook plugin ?
best regards,
Felipe Gaścho
You can check acegi, http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/acegisecurity/acegisecurity/doc/
It uses latest docbook xsl.