Erdos Had The Number First

I love docbook. I used to be a Lout user. But then, bowing to peer pressure, I went back to LaTeX and was happy for a long time. LaTeX had much to offer, and my reports were typeset well. The problem was that LaTeX made certain things harder than it should, and it’s PDF output left something to be desired. And, well lets face, I was young and LaTeX was old. (this is as funny as I get, you know).

Then I found DocBook. A buddy of mine had been using it for a while, and he talked about how great SGML was, and how much you could do with it.

So I gave it a try. At first, things were slow going. I was a SuSE user, and setting up a working SGML environment was not as easy as it was under Debian. I also worked a lot in Windows, and getting a working SGML environment in Windows was a trial for a neophyte such as me.

So I switched to Debian, and the XML dtd’s came around and the rest is history. It’s great. There is a fantastic book by Bob Stayton that shows you how to do an aweful lot of great things with XSL and docbook.

The only problem I have with docbook is that it is SO G*&!%AMN HARD to create rtf documents. I have people I work with you will only accept word documents, and word documents with a certain template. I’ve tried commercial products, I’ve tried a lot of stuff. What I have to do now is

1. Process document with Openjade (but only if it doesn’t have XIncludes, which I use)
2. Hand edit the produced rtf document in word so that it works

I know there is a way to do what I want, the thing I fear is that I might have to learn RTF to accomplish it. Or may buy FrameMaker :).