I've noticed that Boost.Build documentation, created with BoostBook, explicitly sets a small, and IMO unreadable, font, so I went to fix that, and some other things, as shown at:
The font and size is set with our stylesheets, nothing to do with Boostbook/docbook.
However, after a few easy tweaks, I'm stuck at the fact that BoostBook/DocBook produces fairly old-fashioned HTML. For example, the Boost logo at top is actually a table,
We're responsible for that too - it's part of our customisation layer - if it's old fashioned, it's because it was written a long time ago and no one has touched it since!
and the "tip" block is also a table, which makes tweaking the layout with CSS quite a bit more complex. Also, some of the conceptually trivial things, like putting some front matter in index.html, appear to require XSLT customization.
I think that's this XSL param: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/doc/html/chunk.first.sect... When "false" the first section ends up in the index page (right after the index), or maybe you meant something else?
As heretic as it sounds, do we get any benefits from BoostBook? It's a complex vocabulary, with complex toolchain, and while PDF generation sounded nice 10 years ago, printing HTML into PDF is a viable option these days - and nobody would want to print entire Boost documentation anyway?
Personally I like the PDF's *of individual libraries* not the whole thing - they're easier to search and often to navigate than the HTML. BTW printing HTML looses a lot of the structural information that docbook contains, for example you don't get the document outline in the left pane. Of course if I'm online I tend to google rather than open up the local docs, but that doesn't always work. John.