[ILUG] question : docbook/cvs users

[dara]

Hi All,

I plan to look at docbook over the hols and would like to hear from list 
members about their experiences with it, best practices, tools, etc, if 
people have found better alternative options etc.

Basically i will have documntation for which i want :
- control over edits ( e.g. cvs )
- ability to output in many formats (odt, doc, pdf, html, etc)
- editable from linux and windows (perhaps more)

So far I have had a quick peek online at the docbook site and elsewhere 
but have not got too far on the reading-up end of things.

I have also used OpenOffice.org 2.0 to save a .doc as .xml (docbook) - 
lost the headers/footers, title, index and some other formatting but I'm 
sure I'll get there with it eventually.

Currently the potential issues I see are :
-  having an index/toc, perhaps with 'links' to the sections described 
in docbook and where appropriate in the output format.
-  keeping it cvs 'friendly'. Ie will various editors mangle the docbook 
xml different ways that makes the cvs log/history useless ?  I can write 
a wee parser-app to pretty-print the xml, but if it's bloated with extra 
tags as per some html that may well be pointless.

If I could get everybody onvolved with this to use the same editor - 
e.g. openOffice - this could help somewhat with the latter issue perhaps.

Many thanks in advance for any comments, pointers, etc.

Regards

Dara