You do not need to submit your initial document to the LDP in anything more than plain text! Other open submission formats are accepted as well, for instance OpenOffice documents, RTF files or HTML. The LDP volunteers will convert your document to DocBook for you. Once it has been converted you will need to maintain your document in DocBook format, but that should be obvious.
You may use any word processing or text editing tool to write your initial document. When you get to the markup stage you may want to use a text editor which recognizes DocBook files. At a minimum a program which adds syntax highlighting to your markup will make life a lot easier. For a description of editors which can handle DocBook files please skip to Section 2, “Editing tools”.
For more information on how to use git to maintain your LDP documents, please read Appendix C, git revision control.
Some writing tools will come with their own built-in spell check tools. This list is only if your application does not have a spell check option.
Spell Check Software
This spell check application can work around XML tags. By distinguishing between content and markup aspell is able to check your content and ignore the bits it shouldn't be looking at. If you are getting spelling errors in your markup tags you may be using an old version and should upgrade.
The aspell command comes with the aspell package, included on most Linux distributions. Use the command as follows:
aspell -c file
An interactive user interface allows for fast and easy correction of errors. Use the --help to read more about aspell features.
Similar to aspell, but tries to spell check your markup tags. If you have a choice, use aspell, if not, ispell is a very acceptable substitute.