I've been doing some playing with DocBook lately.

I like it as a concept. I am focused only on what I'm writing, not how my writing looks or will look when it's done. I can output to variety of formats. It's a text format, does CVS diffs nicely, and (mostly) makes sense to my brain.

I've found a decent DocBook editor called the XMLmind XML Editor. It's not painless, but it does a number of useful things, like completely prevent you from composing invalid Docbook, and giving you context aware commands for elements you can add above, along, or below the current element.

What I don't like about my DocBook experience thus far is that XSL is a pain to deal with. Though you'd think there would be hundreds of great XSL templates for DocBook, there aren't. Ever noticed how plain and unexciting most DocBook documentation looks? There's a reason for that.

I will happily take this as a challenge to get serious about XSL, because the benefits are likely to outweigh the annoyances. At least, I hope that's how it will turn out.