book design request; i need some good advice

[rparker]

Hi,

I've got a 70ish page docbook document. In attempting to design the book, I've begun looking into SVG graphics. The book is a professional audio engineering reference and instructional manual. There are numerous frequency spectrum graphics that could share common graphs.

I'm not very proficient with docbook and xml. I just did the monkey see some code, monkey modify it thing. It's a pain in the butt for me to use an SVG drawing program like Inkscape to draw images and then render them to bitmaps.

What I Need
A graph design program that enables designing a vertical left column text for DB levels, bottom horizontal of frequency bands, square box representing DB and audible range with colors that highlight points of interest? That's pretty simple, I guess. But I need to design the frequency graphic and reuse it many times but with modifications to the frequency points of interest . What graphing applications are you people using? I'm mostly interested in GPL or free solutions, I'm a linux user...

What is the best method for managing collections of graphics in a book?

Do you create graphics with an application and then manually mark the new graphic into the document?

Could someone provide docbook-pdf SVG sample of code that transforms? I've succesfully used to FO > PDF to transform SVG but can't figure out the docbook-pdf transformation.

Do I need to switch from Docbook to an XML whatever and if you that's a good idea is there scripts for handling this change? I don't want to manually edit the code.

Some of my questions are pretty naive but I'd really appreciate any thoughts and suggestions.

ron