[UFO Chicago] Docbook vs TeX (Was: more oldies but goodies)

[Brian Sobolak]

On Wed, January 7, 2015 9:59 am, Neil R. Ormos wrote:
> jay at m5.chicago.il.us wrote:
>> Brian Sobolak wrote:
>
>>> - nano, because it only has like 8 commands
>>> - rsync, for backups
>>> - docbook (thanks Jim!) for writing in text and then deciding later
>>> which format I want to push it into.
>
>> I never heard of docbook.  Apparently I have missed too many meetings
>> this past year.  How does it differ from, e.g., TeX?
>
> Docbook is an XML-based (or for older versions,
> SGML-based) markup language that is intended to
> allow an author to write and mark-up a document
> "once" without committing to a particular
> end-product output format.  The Docbook document
> can be processed to produce useful output in a number
> of other formats, with organization and
> structure appropriate to such formats, by means of
> stylesheet transformations (XSLT) or other
> converters. Output formats include single-page and
> "chunked" html, LaTeX, Unix man pages, and
> Texinfo.
>

Of course this dummy typed docbook when that was not at all what I meant. 
I use docutils, in particular the restructured text feature to generate
reasonable html from plain text that isn't too different from how I write
normally.

And Jay -- it does have a LaTex output option.

brian


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