Re: [docbook] DocBook and Publishing Software

[Michael Smith <smith at xml-doc dot org>]

David White <davidw@kencook.com> writes:

> The company I work for is making decisions about its plans for future 
> docbook publishing and the current situation that Framemaker is in.  
> Given that Frame may not survive,

What makes you think Frame may not survive? Have there been rumors
about Adobe end-of-lifing it or something? It's still a really
powerful program and hard to imagine (for me at least) that's
it's not going to continue to be around for a long time to come.

I think one thing that's limiting Frame now is that you still need
a MIF parser to work with it. It wouldn't be to big leap for them
to move to replacing MIF with an XML-based vocabulary. Similar to
the OpenOffice XML format or WordML. Then we could work with Frame
files using whatever XML parser or XSLT engine we wanted.

> and that docbook / XML is the format of choice for our
> publishing needs.  What are your opinions on software solutions
> for a publishing department?  Granted the department has
> individuals of different roles such as writers and editors etc.
> 
> The tools I have seen are two fold: WYSWYG publishing (ala frame) via 
> Adobe InDesign (which I hear isn't ready yet to replace Quark or Frame 
> yet, dont know its DocBook abilities at all).

It doesn't make much sense to look for publishing tools with
specific support for DocBook. The DocBook XSL stylesheets
generates standards-compliant XSL-FO output. So I think maybe you
ought to be looking instead for tools that can work with XSL-FO.

  --Mike

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