Preface

Table of Contents
Why Read This Book?
This Book's Audience
Organization of This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
Getting This Book
Getting Examples from This Book
Getting DocBook
Request for Comments
Acknowledgements from Norm
Acknowledgements from Lenny
Acknowledgements from Norm and Lenny

DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents using SGML or XML. It is particularly well-suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to them. DocBook is a document type definition (DTD). Because it is a large and robust DTD, and because its main structures correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a book, DocBook has been adopted by a large and growing community of authors. DocBook is supported "out of the box" by a number of commercial tools, and support for it is rapidly growing in a number of free software environments. In short, DocBook is an easy-to-understand and widely used DTD. Dozens of organizations use DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide.

Why Read This Book?

This book is designed to be the clear, concise, normative reference to the DocBook DTD. This book is the official documentation for the DocBook DTD.

We hope to answer, definitively, all the questions you might have about all the elements and entities in DocBook. In particular, we cover the following subjects: