Re: DOCBOOK: Newbie: Producing indexed eBooks with DocBook?

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

[ Follow-ups to docbook-apps, please. ]

/ Thomas Nichols <thomas.nichols@iname.com> was heard to say:
| However, I'm unclear how I actually "publish" to HTML, and from the manual 
| I get the impression that I need a fairly detailed grasp of DSSSL to do 
| this, using maybe Jade as a tool. Is this right? I think I would then get 

Yes, using Jade and the DSSSL stylesheets, and a little Perl,
you can get your indexterms into your document.

| generation of an index from the IndexTerms I specified - what about an 
| automatically-generated index of all words (except those in a list I supply)?

I don't know of a tool that builds indexes that way.

| An alternative seems to be to use docbook2X (docbook2texi) and then 
| texi2html -- is this also feasible? Would this build the index for me?

I have no idea.

| And then there are the commercial options - do tools like Framemaker 
| support both near-WYSIWYG editing and also HTML publishing? Whilst I'll 
| happily use XEmacs / PSGML / Norm.Walsh's DocBook IDE if that's an 
| appropriate option, what I'd prefer is a tool which shields me from some of 
| the underlying wizardry -- that can be a commercial tool if necessary. I'm 
| checking out the features of the tools mentioned as supporting DocBook.

Arbortext's Epic product line includes a fairly sophisticated
and complete DocBook application. (Disclaimer: I used to work for them.)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | The most universal quality is
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | diversity.--Montaigne
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |