I guess this is not directly related, but I worked on a modified DocBook XML schema for some years. We were writing grammars of natural languages, so we had no use for some of the DocBook constructs, and needed to add others. That wasn't hard. And there are WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editors, like XMLmind, which read the schema and helped you create conforming documents.
There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX.
I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice:
(1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades.
(2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).
There are at least two ways to get from such an XML document to a PDF; we used pdfLaTeX, modified to handle our extra constructs, and then XeLaTeX.
I won't say it was a simple toolpath, but it allowed us to do at least two things that would have been difficult with Word or OpenOffice:
(1) It gave us an archival XML format, which will probably be readable and understandable for centuries. For grammars of endangered languages, that's important, because the languages won't be around more than a couple decades.
(2) It gave us the ability to cleanly typeset documents that had multiple scripts (including both Roman and various right-to-left scripts, like Arabic and Thaana).