DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide

Preface

DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents using XML. It is particularly well suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to them. Because it is a large and robust format, and because its main structures correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a book, DocBook has been adopted by a large and growing community of authors. DocBook is supported “out of the box” by a wide range of tools, both open source and commercial. In short, DocBook is an easy-to-understand and widely used schema. Worldwide, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of organizations use DocBook for millions of pages of documentation in a wide variety of print and online formats.

Why Read This Book?

This book is designed to be the clear, concise, normative reference to the DocBook schema. This book is the official documentation for DocBook.

We hope to answer, definitively, all the questions you might have about all the elements and attributes in DocBook. In particular, we cover the following subjects:

Getting started with DocBook

With around 400 elements, DocBook can be a bit overwhelming at first. We get you up to speed quickly.

Writing DocBook documents

Where should you start and what should you do?

Parsing and validating DocBook documents

After you’ve written a document, how can you tell if it really conforms to the DocBook schema?

Publishing DocBook documents

After you’ve written one, what do you do with it? We introduce some popular free tools ...