I am trying to use QuickBook to write documentation for a project (that's not a Boost library), and I have a basic question about how to use it.

So far I've followed the setup instructions on this page, built the quickbook executable by running bjam in BOOST_ROOT\tools\quickbook, written a .qbk file in QuickBook format, and ran the quickbook executable on my .qbk file to produce an XML file which looks like BoostBook XML.

Now how do I go about generating HTML or PDF from that BoostBook XML file?

Take a look at https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/BoostDocs/GettingStarted to get an overview of how the toolchain works, then assuming you want to run the commands yourself (ie not from Boost.Build) I suggest you cd into libs/config/doc and run a: bjam -d2 -a So you can see what all the command are. Otherwise running via Boost.Build is probably the easiest way for now.... HTH, John.