[undees]

Seconded. AsciiDoc is enough like writing a plain-text e-mail that everything but the writing just falls away.

For a little more control, you can feed the generated DocBook to something like Remko's DocBook kit (https://github.com/remko/docbook-kit), which downloads and runs the various document processors for converting to PDF in stages--with gnarly XML config files available for each stage. This can be helpful for trying to match a specific conference template, for instance.