[OT] Tooling for the CouchDB Definitive Guide

[Brian Candler <B....@pobox.com>]

Hi,

This is rather off-topic, but I'm about to do some work on a user manual for
another open source project, and they're looking for alternatives to their
current approach (which is editing docbook XML directly, using a tool called
"serna").

So I was having a look at how "CouchDB: The Definitive Guide" does it. It
says:

"All of the source code that goes into making this book is available on
Github. That includes everything we used to publish as book on paper and on
the Web."

I've checked it out, and found the 'master' branch which has the src/ and
bin/ directories. But I'm unable to find a few pieces, in particular:

- the tools used to take the HTML and convert it into book.xml
- the source for the diagrams, and how these are converted into PDF and PNG

Are these parts proprietary to O'Reilly? Or done manually?

It's the HTML->XML which matters to me, because I'd like to know how
realistic it is to keep the HTML as the "master" source of content, and
generate docbook from that.

Many thanks,

Brian.