On 7/22/16 11:25 AM, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
BoostBook was invented inside Boost, but to a large extend is useful outside of Boost. So a few years ago we started an effort to "standardize" it, i.e. merge it (and by "it" I mean the schema as well as the stylesheets) into the DocBook project itself. (Note that some of the BoostBook are actually too specific for a wider audience, but the parts that aren't should eventually be available as part of DocBook.
OK - so this is a DocBook project rather than a Boost project. But the version of DocBook that boost uses is DocBook 4 and uses a DTD schema. The more current version of DocBook is 5.0. DocBook 5.1 is specified but the last complete reference is DocBook 5.0. And interest in DocBook has seemed to have waned. Of course it's not going to disappear as a lot of stuff is made for it. And, though I hate XML, it does a good job of factoring out the meaning of the document elements from that of the formating. I think it was a good choice for BoostBook to be a specialized version of DocBook which includes transforms from BoostBook to DocBook. I think that enhancing the BoostBook tool chain might be a worthwhile and doable task. a) add enhancement to produce epub. I think this wouldn't be too hard and would be useful. b) Consider translating BoostBook to DocBook 5.0. Again, I think this might be worthwhile and it might easily doable. c) Consider dropping BoostBook entirely and using DocBook 5 directly. I wonder if the special tags for BoostBook are all that useful. The work is done so it's not a big issue. I've made some documentation in boost book and some in DocBook 5 and I don't see a huge difference from the author's point of view. Using DocBook direclty, would make the tool chain smaller and simpler. Of course such a task would of necessity require an update of quickbook ....
Stefan