Docbook on Oxygen

I have not been blogging much lately - too much job depression in the air I guess. I have started a new home project - trying to get a good transform for my docbook documention. My idea is to use fop (ouch) and saxon to generate PDF output of professional quality. Given the complexity of our documents and the proliferation of different features (vector and raster graphics, multi-language and a bit of math thrown in) I think this will be very difficult. I did look at the docbook to latex transformation project and it looks very interesting. I will try that when fop does not work (I suppose that would mean starting to hack eps files again...).

I got the docbook xslt book, so I think I have a chance. Unforturnately my documents are all written with epic 4.x, so I have the added adventure of using the arbortext flavor of the docbook dtd. I am slowly but surely getting started. Once I have a good xslt/fop build, I will start hacking the stylesheets to see if I can produce some presentable copy. I am early in the process, so I am still optimistic.

I have been using the latest Oxygen XML editor (on the one month trial) and I must say I love it (but I don't know why). There are certainly some rough edges, but for xslt I find it to be pretty darn good (and yes it does let me transform docbook into pdf with minimum fuss). I would like to buy it, but I don't dare ask the boss for another toy... maybe I will buy a home license..