A few customers have been using DocBook for their documentation but decided to move to a wiki-based approach for various reasons. This article describes the migration from a DocBook based approach to Confluence/Scroll.
A little bit of background: DocBook is an XML dialect (actually it is coming from the per-XML era, when it was based on SGML) and provides a set of tools - editors and a XSL-based publishing toolchain for publishing Docbook files into various target formats: PDF, HTML, WinHelp, JavaHelp - you name it. Traditionally DocBook users had to overcome three obstacles: Getting used to write DocBook XML (most editors didn't help a lot with this), setting up the publishing toolchain and creating a so-called customization layer for styling the output generated by the DocBook XSL stylesheets. Scroll makes using DocBook a lot easier: convert a tree of pages to DocBook, provide a ready to use tool chain, and provide preset customization layers with additional theming options.
If you have an existing setup of the DocBook tools (tool chain and customization layer) you can use Scroll in two different ways:
- Let Scroll export DocBook from Confluence and use your existing DocBook toolchain and customization layers for export. This approach provides the most flexibilty and allows for export of target formats, which are not supported by Scroll (yet).
- Plug-in your existing DocBook customization layer as 'Theme Plugin' into Scroll and let Scroll render the output formats. This approach has two benefits: Everything is included in Scroll and it is very simple to use. Also, the PDF generation will be done by the embedded RenderX XEP PDF engine, which is the most advanced Java-based XSL-FO engine. More information about creating Scroll theme can be found in the Developer Guide.
 | K15t professional services provides theme plugin development on a project basis. Please contact sales@k15t.com for a quote. |
Add Comment