: Re: Technical Writing Software I'm interested in newer software/software stack to use in writing technical papers. For the longest time I have been use LaTeX to handle this but in looking at getting

@Goswami879

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As Viktor said, FrameMaker is probably the best widely-used tool for doing what you're trying to do. Another (Windows-only) tool that I'm using now is Madcap Flare, but it's pretty pricy.

Other considerations:

DocBook is a spec, not a tool (as Viktor said). It is XML, so you can use any XML editor to write content. Possibilities include XML Notepad (free), XML Spy (used to be free, not now?), Oxygen ($), Epic ($$). (Personally I just use Emacs, but my coworkers think I'm weird. :-) )

To get from DocBook XML to usable output you'll need some transformation step. We use XSLTProc to generate HTML and XEP ($) to produce PDF. (The actual chain there is XML -> FO (formating objects) -> PDF.) We rolled our own build scripts for this, using style sheets and other resources downloaded from the DocBook site where we could. There might be better off-the-shelf support now (we build this about seven years ago), but since you mentioned being willing to roll your own, I wanted to note that it is doable.

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