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In the previous posting, I described the disadvantages of using a word processor to create documents, and outlined the advantages of using a more structured approach - an approach in which content is separated cleanly from formatting. In this post, I will give an example of such an approach, and in the next post, I will describe a free tool that makes it just as easy as word processing.

The approach in question is to use a well-established XML dialect called DocBook. Quoting the DocBook Web site:

[DocBook] began in 1991 as a joint project of HaL Computer Systems and O'Reilly. Its popularity grew, and eventually it spawned its own maintainance organization, the Davenport Group. In mid-1998, it became a Technical Committee (TC) of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

DocBook has become the leading way to write structured documents. You create a set of XML files to represent your report, article, book, or whatever - and use XML "stylesheets" to generate from these files a number of finished products. You might require, for example, both a PDF version for printing/download and an HTML version for display using a Web browser. The ability to select any stylesheet for generating output means that on different occasions you can generate each of these end products with different typefaces, layouts, and so on.

Are you put off by the mention of a techie language such as XML? Never fear, as a document author there is no need for you ever to touch the stuff. There are (free) tools available that allow you to write DocBook, and generate all sorts of useful output, without needing even to see the underlying XML code.

TAKE AWAY

Creating a document in which the content (for instance, XML DocBook files) is separated cleanly from the formatting (for instance, as stylesheets) means that you automatically gain various useful advantages. In particular, you can store written materials in a repository, searchable according to the internal structure of the documents it contains. You also gain the very useful ability to generate various different forms of output from a single document with little or no effort - both for printing and for Web browsing, for example, or using different fonts, colours and layout.

DocBook is actually very simple to use - the XML tags are intuitive, with names such as chapter, title, section and so on. However, most people prefer not to write XML by hand. So there are many tools available, some of the best ones being free, which make it as simple to write a DocBook document as a Microsoft Word document. In the next blog post, I will describe one such tool and explain how to use it. If you are starting to see the benefits of changing the way you (and your colleagues) write documents, stay tuned.

Posted by keithhb in Office Applications |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us