Docbook vs Apache Forrest

Recently, we need to work on open-source document products. For example, the official help manuals of spring and Hibernate are generated using such products.

In this regard, the docbook and Apache Forrest XML-based document framework tools are undoubtedly dominant. Basically, both frameworks allow you to freely define the layout, format, and chapter of a document to complete your "work ". They require you to completely write documents based on a specific schema/DTD, and then generate final document products such as XHTML, PDF, and RTF Based on the application's style table.

For an enterprise application project based on the Java 1.5 platform, I prefer to use docbook because it looks more mature and has more auxiliary tools. However, in comparison, forrest seems to have a shorter learning curve.

I think the XML dialect of Forrest can cover 80% of application scenarios and is relatively easy to use. However, for a large software project, it is hard to imagine that documents in printable format do not need to be generated, which is the advantage of docbook.

As I mentioned above, when using docbook to write documents, there will be a lot of tools for you to choose from, although I have not found much outstanding (Tool :-):

• Conglomerate-this tool looks promising, but it can only run on UNIX systems.
• Docbook template for OpenOffice-it seems a bit faulty to use this tool to generate "chapters" and does not support all docbook features.
• Vex-Vex is an Eclipse plug-in that looks promising, but I think it is somewhat difficult to use.
• Big list of docbook tools-what is this? I don't know.

Writing XML documents by hand may also be a good method, but it would be even better if you could have a satisfactory visual tool to assist, wouldn't you?

Finally, another advantage of the docbook I want to talk about is that it has some completed books: