Publishing systems for DocBook XML
From the Source
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Good software requires detailed documentation. The DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite, Publican, and Yelp all let you generate a variety of documents – from man pages to eBooks.
Documentation for standard software tools can be written using the simplest resources. For example, the ReadMe files included in most source code packages can be written with the use of any text editor. In recent years, developers have also used the Markdown format [1], which offers bulleted lists, listings, and web links and is formatted neatly by code hosting provider GitHub.
However, users of powerful software suites, particularly commercial software, need and expect genuine manuals. The DocBook [2] format, which exists in SGML and XML flavors, satisfies this need, prevailing over more lightweight competitors, such as reStructuredText [3].
DocBook provides everything a developer needs for a professional manual – from tables of content and tables of figures to cross references and indexes. DocBook has also established itself as a kind of lingua franca for technical documentation. Free software can handle this language just as well as proprietary applications, such as Adobe FrameMaker.
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