Newbie tutorial anywhere?

[Djelibeybi]

Hi guys,

I've been meaning to get into learning about DocBook for a while and I finally have a project that requires it. However, I'm finding it quite tough starting out. All the options are quite overwhelming, and I seem to be getting lost a lot.

Does anyone know of a good beginners tutorial for starting out with DocBook and some help creating transformations (e.g. into PDF or multi-page HTML?)

Many thanks!

[Dan]

In the Articles section you may find a short tutorial about using Oxygen for generating PDF from Docbook documents:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/HowToCreat ... Oxygen.pdf

A general docbook tutorial is:

http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/crash-course/

[Djelibeybi]

Thanks Dan. That's just what I was looking for.

[Djelibeybi]

Two more (real newbie) questions:

1. When I transform my XML, I get a whole bunch of  characters in the HTML output and I can't understand why.

2. I have given my chapters id= attributes but the individual chapter HTML files are still being named ch01.html, etc.

[Dan]

1. I cannot explain the strange characters. In what context they appear? In front of some list items?

2. You can set this parameter to 1:
use.id.as.filename

For more info, see:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/HtmlOutput.html

[Djelibeybi]

Thanks for that link -- very useful! I seem to have fixed the strange character bug by using the HTML XSL instead of the XHTML one. I'll look into that one more a little later.

[george]

Hi,

I seem to have fixed the strange character bug by using the HTML XSL instead of the XHTML one. I'll look into that one more a little later.

This seems to be an encoding related problem. Try setting your browser encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) and the document should be rendered correctly.

Best Regards,
George

[Djelibeybi]

Thanks George. I figured it had to be something like that, but I didn't really have the time for all the necessary testing. I'm now trying to convince the boss to replace our manuals with DocBooks, so I have a different battle on my hands.

[goa103]

Hi,

Thanks George. I figured it had to be something like that, but I didn't really have the time for all the necessary testing. I'm now trying to convince the boss to replace our manuals with DocBooks, so I have a different battle on my hands.

My advice would be to write the new ones using DocBook, not to replace the old one. For example I used to write my docs using Microsoft Office XP, then I switched to OpenOffice.org, now I'm more interested by DocBook to write user guides and manuals... But I never thought about rewriting all my Microsoft Office XP documents . I simply converted them to OpenOffice.org documents, now I can even convert them to DocBook documents, because OpenOffice.org documents are just plain XML documents, so you can edit them using oXygen .

JM