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Abstract
This article is describing how to install and use a publication chain based on publican and serna-free software. This article has been written using this publication chain and is used as an example of document redaction and publication.
About the author
Xavier Berger is working as Solution Architect in a telecom company. He is a specialist in Linux and network deployment. Xavier enjoys hiking, geocaching, skiing and spending time with his family. His web site is: http://xberger.free.fr
1. Introduction
Publication chain
A publication chain is a technological and methodological process to product documents. The publication chain approach is to create a document model containing the data and the description of the formatting. The final document is generated by rendering in the desired format (pdf, html, epub...)
DocBook
DocBook is a semantics markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.
A semantic language is describing a document and separate content from presentation. DocBook file is storing the data XML format. The following screenshot is showing how a document described with a semantic markup language could be represented.
Publican
Publican is a tool dedicated to process DocBook XML. It is a rendering engine which can generate document in different kind of format by applying a transformation to the XML data. It will result reader friendly documents in various format like pdf, html or ePub.
Serna
serna-free is an open source software designed to manipulate XML data in various format. DocBook is one of these formats. serna-free provides a WYSIWYM GUI: What You See Is What You Mean Graphical User Interface. It allows to easily edit XML documents.
poedit
poedit is a software dedication to the translation. It give to the translator a graphical user interface and shows the status of the translation of the document. We will see in the last part of this document how to use it and provide a multi-language documentation.
About this article
This article has been written using serna-free, publican and poedit. We will see how install and use a publication chain based on these three softwares.
