Migrate from DocBook to Confluence and Scroll DocBook Exporter

This article describes the migration from a DocBook based approach to Confluence / Scroll DocBook Exporter.

DocBook Background

DocBook is an XML dialect (actually it is coming from the per-XML era, when it was based on SGML) and provides a set of tools - editors and a XSL-based publishing toolchain for publishing Docbook files into various target formats: PDF, HTML, WinHelp, JavaHelp - you name it.

Traditionally DocBook users had to overcome three obstacles:

• Getting used to write DocBook XML (most editors didn't help a lot with this)
• Setting up the publishing toolchain and
• Creating a so-called customization layer for styling the output generated by the DocBook XSL stylesheets.

Scroll DocBook Exporter makes using DocBook a lot easier:

• Convert a tree of pages to DocBook
• Provide a ready to use tool chain, and
• Provide preset customization layers with additional theming options.

If you have an existing setup of the DocBook tools (tool chain and customization layer) you can use Scroll DocBook Exporter in two different ways:

1. Let Scroll export DocBook from Confluence and use your existing DocBook toolchain and customization layers for export. This approach provides the most flexibilty and allows for export of target formats, which are not supported by our Scroll Exporters (yet).
2. Plug-in your existing DocBook customization layer as 'Theme Plugin' into Scroll DocBook Exporter and let Scroll DocBook Exporter render the output formats.
   This approach has two benefits:
   Everything is included in Scroll and it is very simple to use. Also, the PDF generation will be done by the embedded RenderX XEP PDF engine, which is the most advanced Java-based XSL-FO engine. More information about creating Scroll DocBook templates can be found in the Scroll DocBook documentation.