You can take a look at the doc jamfile in numerous Boost libraries that use quickbook to see how to set things up, including my own tti or vmd. The main dependency for quickbook is boostbook/docbook, with alternate dependencies on auto_index and doxygen. That is 3, not 12.
A 'main' dependency is not 'all' dependencies. I can't even find the documentation I tried to follow in order to do it, but when I tried to build it, there were about 12 dependencies (it may've shrunk since then, I don't know). XSLT, java, various others. Most of them had no documentation. You can break it down in a way that makes it sound like less than it is, but overall I'm just not interested in the system.
I understand the frustration in the almost total lack of formal docs for going from quickbook to html/pdf. But quickbook itself is a piece of cake, is very well documented, and blissfully easy to specify most everything you need to do in creating library documentation.
I think if you're already familiar with all of the technologies involved, it's easy. But it's actually not from the point of view of someone coming in on the 'ground floor'. I don't waste what little energy I have learning technologies merely to build docs. There seems to be tacit disapproval, reading through this, of people building straight HTML for documentation, and I think that's a real shame. I worked in XML/XSLT once and I understand the advantages, but if boost is around longer than HTML, I'll be very, very surprised. And the disadvantages of complication for something as transitory as a code library is not worth it. M