Creating documentation with maven

Question

I'm just in the middle of revisiting maven. Our team had a bad experience when we last looked at this, as it was during the period when maven was rearchitecting from 1.x to 2.x, so a lot of the dependencies we needed hadn't been moved across to the new repositories. However, I have the time to reconsider now.

I am interested in using maven and either LaTeX or DocBook for creating documentation, and I was wondering if anyone had any experiences to share, project/module structure, good plugins to use, etc...

Many thanks :-)

Edit:

Just to clarify, I was looking to write a technical article/book, and my desired artifact would probably be a PDF.

Answer 1

DocBook is one of the many supported inputs to Doxia, the engine used to generate docs by maven. Refer here: http://maven.apache.org/doxia/modules/index.html

In fact, the Doxia site answers your exact question: http://maven.apache.org/doxia/book/index.html

Answer 2

You can easily create a site (that contains documentation) with Maven using the mvn site command (i.e. using the plugin site).

This plugin creates technical reports (such as Javadoc, Unit tests reports, code coverage...) but can be also used to create a "real site". You have more details about that in this page.

Basically, you write your page using APT (Almost Plain Text which is quite simple to understand), or a XML-based format, Xdoc.

2 years ago, I create a complete user guide for one application I developed, using the XDoc format and the Site Maven plugin. Globally, it was quite easy to create!

I hope this will help you!