The DocBook DTD is broadly viewed as the de-facto standard for writing technical documentation. The XML variant of the proven SGML edition is not officially endorsed yet by OASIS. Nevertheless, all the tools are available in open-source to setup a DocBook XML publishing system so you can generate multiple output formats based on a single XML source. Although, due to some bugs and incomplete implementations, not all output beyond straight HTML can be generated in equal quality, I believe XML is the way to go and is worth to invest in. Inevitably things will grow better. The choice for a Win32 implementation looks a bit peculiar considering I use open source tools. Why not use Linux? I do use Linux as a server platform, but practice is that Windows still is, at least for the majority of my clients, the desktop system of choice. The good news is that all the major tools are Java based. So I only need to use Microsofts nmake.exe for the build process and the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop to compile native windows helpfiles. Ofcource the DTD and XLS files are portable across operating systems. This article is not a tutorial but a hands-on guide to setup the system. My main purpose is to consolidate my research and (some) development in writing and showing you some DocBook at the same time.