DocBook is a general purpose XML and SGML document type particularly well
suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software (though
it is by no means limited to these applications).
--DocBook.org
For the impatient
In the next sections we will be explaining about the theoretical side of DocBook, its origins, development, advantages and disadvantages. If you just want the practical side, check out these sections for an overview of HOWTO DocBook:
,
Appendix D,
and Appendix E
from this guide.
For the beginner
We wish to stress again the fact that any open document format will
be accepted. If you feel more comfortable with plain text, OpenOffice or
HTML, that is fine with us. If you do not look forward to learning
DocBook, LDP volunteerd will convert your document to DocBook XML. To us, the most important task for our authors is the actual writing, not the formatting, keep that in mind!
From the point of submission onwards, however, you will have to maintain
your document in this XML format, but that's a piece of cake. Promised.
Although there are other DTDs used to write documentation,
there are a few reasons not to use them.
DocBook is the most
popular DTD, being
used by more than a dozen major open source projects from
GNOME to Python to FreeBSD.
The tools for DocBook
are more developed than others. DocBook support is
included in most Linux distributions, allowing you to
send raw files to be processed at the receiver's end.
And finally, DocBook
has an extensive set of tags (over 300 in all) which is
very useful when you are trying to describe the content
of a document. Fortunately for new authors the majority
of them do not need to be used for simple documentation.
