New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
Depends on what you're trying to do. Placing graphics isn't difficult if you're just inserting graphics into the flow of text or block elements. However, if you're doing something like fancy layout design, like partly transparent background images or rounded graphics that you want to wrap text around, or even text on paths, then docbook is likely not the best option.
I use scribus for projects that require fancy layouts. I use docbook for the docs that I want to be able to work on without a GUI, and that many other people would do in a word processor. I don't consider it a layout or design schema...maybe some day, when I'm much much better with XSL...
Years ago, I took a job that had me working in rST and markdown. Three years was long enough to assure me that Docbook was the better choice. I'm happy to report that my current job has me back in Docbook.
I'd rather spend 8 hours for one day getting my XSL right than spend three hours every day for the rest of my life hacking around rST and markdown syntax exceptions.