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Should I use Docbook or LaTeX?

Asked by Juan Montoya

What I expect from word processing is to write a thesis, a novel, a user's manual or a thing that looks like a D&D manual, and render it into presentable formats such as PDF or html.
I see documents such as the css2 specification, php or mysql documentation, which can be downloaded in html, pdf, chm, and stuff. And the documents have a table of contents and index, hypertext and all.

I want to do it like they do.

What should I use? Docbook or LaTeX?

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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said : 		#1

you want to do what like who does? all you've said is a bunch of gibberish.

anyhoo, here's a description of what docbook is/does

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook

LaTex is a typesetting program.

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mycae (mycae) said : 		#2

What he has asked makes sense.

Latex is a markup language, as well as a processor, docbook is just a markup language, but does not have a defined preprocessor. There are a number of good editors, and I recommend "Kile", if you do choose latex

Latex's PDF output is excellent (provided by the processor pdflatex), however conversion to html is possible, but is not perfect. I do not know of any chm builders from latex.

I believe most professional publishing houses use docbook, and the opensource typsetting engines with their own template files.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DocBook

My advice would be to write a short (1 page) document in both, lorem ipsum style, then try to do the layout how you want it -- ie the end forms you want to use.

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