This article proposes a set of powerful XML technologies (e. g. DocBook, SVG…) to automate authoring of large, detailed and highly visual documentation which would be difficult and error prone to reproduce manually. The author further proposes best-practices for XML authoring and introduces a simple yet powerful framework which supports tasks typically related to document publishing and integration of information from various sources. Rather than building a complex theoretical background this article focuses on being very practical. It demonstrates the use of various technologies on a case study taken from the networking industry.