There is a relatively new tool called asciidoc that tackles several of the problems associated with DocBook rather effectively.
The asciidoc tool accepts a simple, lightweight syntax resembling wiki markups and turns it into various output formats using DocBook as an intermediate stage. The asciidoc markup is easier to compose in than DocBook itself, and serves as its own best rendering in flat ASCII.
Printing support in asciidoc is through an experimental LaTeX back end. It is most useful for writing short to medium-length documents for World Wide Web distribution.