Jeffrey Franks wrote:

I though I'd throw in my .02, as a recent newbie (6 months) to all of this stuff who has finally gotten a system that Works for Me(tm).

I've tried all of the free, Unix-friendly options. I read about RenderX until I realized their pricing is in the thousands, and not targeted to single users at all. So after ruling that one right out, I ended up trying the following:

SGML Stylesheets, Jade, JadeTeX, pdfjadetex SGML Stylesheets, OpenJade 1.3, JadeTeX, pdfjadetex XML Stylesheets, FOP with the included Xalan parser XML Stylesheets, Saxon, FOP XML Stylesheets, Saxon, PassiveTeX

Of those, SGML->OpenJade->JadeTeX->pdfjadetex is what I've decided on for my current projects, for the following reasons:

It almost works well. The output actually looks like something you'd consider printing (I'm working on two 250+ page books for publication).

FOP, regardless of parser, is badly broken in some absolutely vital areas for book publication. The most obvious is the TOC is just ugly (justified instead of dot-separated).

I couldn't make PassiveTeX work. I am, by all accounts, a TeX know-nothing. I've managed to install TeXLive6 recently, and learned my way around installing new macro packages, so I'll probably tackle this problem again before all is said and printed.

Customizations are easy. Maybe this is because I've been working with DSSSL longer than XML, but I can't figure out XML much at all, but I've accomplished quite a bit with DSSSL.

Finally, because I'll also be releasing our books as PDF files, it's nice that all of the 'neato' features of PDF are supported by the tool chain (whereas they are not with the XML toolchains that I tried). Bookmarks, links, etc. all work as expected, making for a nice user experience.

Yes. HTML is /easy/ to make work. PDF is a nightmare no matter your toolchain.

I find that sometimes I'll modify tables manually to make them look better on the page. Other than that, I usually modify the stylesheet. But there are some elements of DocBook that I don't use...so I may be missing some ugly bits.

Hope this helps.