[platform-doc-dev] docbook for eclipse documentation?

["scott.hasse" <scott.hasse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

I am new to this list, but was following the Eclipse documentation styles thread.  It seems to me that a good approach to solving that sort of problem is to use an xml-based semantic markup language such as docbook xml for the documentation.

Some of the benefits of this approach are:

* The ability to change the structure, look and feel of the documentation easily.  Of course, many look and feel aspects of this can also be accomplished with style sheets, but having a semantic representation of the documentation gives you much more flexibility.

* The ability to easily generate other formats of the documentation, such as a PDF book, via tools like apache's FOP.

* The ability to automatically generate the plugin toc files.

The obvious downside is that people would need to learn to create the documention in, for instance, docbook xml.

I am currently working on translating some docbook-based project and organization specific documentation in docbook into the eclipse help plugin format, and it is working quite well.  I have created an xslt file that creates an eclipse help toc file from a docbook document, using the sourceforge docbook xml->xhtml chunking xsl transforms as an intermediate format. 

I am curious what you all think of this approach.

Some useful links are:

http://www.docbook.org
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/docbook
http://xml.apache.org/fop/

Sincerely,

Scott Hasse