OpenOffice and DocBook

OpenOffice has a page on DocBook filters that allow import and export of DocBook. The page appears to discuss a proof-of-concept to explore the idea of using OpenOffice to do WYSIWIG editing of DocBook documents.

However, it appears that the filters only support a limited set of DocBook tags.

The OO User Guide has a section on Getting Started With DocBook on OpenOffice that shows how it can be done.

Update: Since I wrote the above I had a chance to work with DocBook support in OpenOffice, and I was disappointed, and I don't think it is promising enough to use in my particular production environment. The cardinal sin OpenOffice committed was dropping some of my DocBook markup, and converting my section tags to sect1, sect2, etc.

OpenOffice's DocBook support is a start, however, and I applaud those who are continuing to move the project forward!

-- DaveBurchell

I have started project docbook2odf with a vision to provide seamless XSLT conversion and generation of OASIS OpenDocuments from DocBook. Generating conversions between these popular formats is even more important with OpenDocument becoming a supported document interchange standard.

-- Roman Fordinál

Comments

I just spent a week using OO v1.02. It supports a subset of DocBook. The XML output is clean, but not necessarily compliant. Problematic is that non-DocBook tags are mixed in with the DocBook ones. It was, however, a reasonably good path from MSWord>OO>OODocBook>XMLMind>pure XML.
There is a tutorial on using DocBook with OpenOffice which looks pretty decent it is available in german: http://www.stefan-rinke.de/articles/publish/ch06.html or in english http://www.stefan-rinke.de/articles/publish/en/ch06.html
There is a page in French about converting documents from OpenOffice to DocBook - http://www.chez.com/ebellot/ooo2sdbk/
ConvertOtherFormatsToDocBook has a link to a to-DocBook-converter for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Writer documents
I was talking to some Sun people at the OOo conference at Hamburg about two weeks ago. They are waiting for user input for the DocBook support of OOo (MichaelWiedmann)
I've been meaning for sometime now to make comments on the OO site about this pilot project. I think it definitely has merit as I've done the same thing with Word 2k (word html->wh2fo->custom xsl->docbook). It works well for those that don't need every tag but just a workable conversion infrastructure (I think I have about 20 or 30 tags which suit my requirements). My only gripe with the OO stuff is that the style names are not DocBook elements but "genericized" and thus it's harder to make a mental mapping between what the OO thinks is a certain dB style. . .
OpenOffice and DocBook, an entry on my personal weblog, pretty well summarizes my (delusional) experience with OpenOffice 1.1.0 and its DocBook filters. -- GiulioPiancastelli

Tutorial

A tutorial on OpenOffice and DocBook is available at http://www.zzoss.com/projects/oowdbk/

-- Sandro Zic