I thought I'd catch up on a slew of DocBook news today. DocBook is an XML application designed for technical documentation and books such as Processing XML with Java. The first item of note is the posting of the second candidate release of DocBook 4.3.
Norm Walsh has posted the first beta of Simplified DocBook 1.1, "a small subset of the DocBook XML DTD." This is based on full DocBook 4.3CR2 and adds support for HTML tables. All other markup should be the same as in simplified DocBook 1.0.
Walsh has also posted version 3.3.0 of DocBook Slides, a system for replacing PowerPoint with XML. This release "contains a lot of patches and bug fixes." It is based on Simplified DocBook 1.1b1.
DocBook: The Definitive Guide has been updated to version 2.0.9 to cover DocBook 4.3CR2. According to Walsh, this is "a 'work in progress'. It purports to document DocBook V4.3 with the EBNF, HTML Forms, MathML, and SVG modules. As it is being actively updated, it may be inconsistent in some areas."
Walsh has also released version 1.6.4.1 of his XSLT stylesheets for DocBook. 1.6.4 "includes many bugfixes (including an experimental fix for correctly generating links when the dbhtml 'dir' PI is used), some performance improvements, and some new features, including a new option for controlling which sections are included in running headers or footers, better control over superscript/subscript properties, and support for the newly add 'code' and 'stepalternatives' markup."
Michael Smith has written a DocBook Menu Mode for Emacs that adds a hierarchical, customizable reference menu that provides "quick access to a variety of DocBook-related documentation directly from within Emacs, and to files in the DocBook XSLT stylesheets distribution." Menu items include