Comparing Mallard to other tools
There is no perfect tool for everything. Selecting a tool mindfully is a process of understanding your needs and strengths and choosing one that supports your goals. Although it can be used to do other things, Mallard is specifically designed for writing structured, topic-oriented user help.
This table will help you compare Mallard's features with other documentation tools available for Linux systems.
| Mallard | DocBook | reStructuredText | LateX | Lout | |
| Build system integration |
yes (autotools) | no | yes | no | no |
| HTML output | yes | yes | yes | yes (latex2html) | no |
| PDF output | no | yes (fop) | yes (rst2pdf) | yes | yes (experimental) |
| XML output | yes | yes | yes | yes (LaTeXML) | no |
| Automatic back-linking | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Page status tracking | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| Auto-updating | yes (in Yelp) | no | no | no | no |