Entering the world of DocBook XML, XSL, FOP, and more
My first major project at eZ Systems was to edit and do layout for the book eZ Publish Content Management Basics (written by Bergfrid Marie Skaara).
eZ Publish is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System that is used to build powerful, flexible web solutions, enabling people and organizations to share their information. Overall, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to writing, editing and managing content with eZ Publish.
Being a self-proclaimed “geek-in-training”, I have the willingness to learn all things techie but often not the knowledge. Working with this book was no exception. XML? I knew that it was a tag-based language. XSL? Heard of it, but didn’t really know what it did. DocBook, FOP? I’d never even heard of those terms.
In I dove, and a few months later, out came the book in a nice PDF. Make no mistake, this was a real team effort, with people like Bergfrid (the author mentioned above) and Jennifer Zickerman (my boss) playing key roles in the technical innerworkings of the book. But I’m the lucky one who gets to write about the process (well, I actually asked to do it) 
With this site, I hope to share what I learned about the whole DocBook production process. This is by no means a comprehensive guide to DocBook (those sorts of things exist!) but hopefully it will serve as a good source of information for those madly Googling (like I did) to find out how things are done.