User Tools

  • Logged in as: anonymous (anonymous)
  • Log Out

Site Tools


mantisbt:docbook

This is an old revision of the document!


Working with DocBook Manuals

Required Tools

No special tools are needed to edit DocBook files, but in order to build DocBook manuals, you need to have a DocBook tool chain installed on your system, including GNU Make, OpenJade, and various DocBook tools.

For Debian- or Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, simply install the necessary packages with the following command:

  $ sudo aptitude install docbook, docbook-dsssl, docbook-slides, docbook-utils, linuxdoc-tools, make, openjade, xmlto

For Fedora-based distros, run this command instead:

  $ su -c 'yum groupinstall "Authoring and Publishing"'

Building a DocBook Manual

We will use the Developer's Guide in English as the example manual for this process, which is in the developers/en/ directory. You can substitute any other manual or language, assuming the manual exists and has been translated to that language.

Enter the directory containing the preferred manual:

  $ cd /path/to/mantisbt/docbook/adminguide/en

Run make with a list of resulting file types that you want to build. Currently, our DocBook manuals can produce PDF, HTML (split or single page), RTF, Postscript, or plain-text manuals. All resulting manual files will be placed in the build/ subdirectory. In this example, we will build both a PDF and a split HTML manual:

  $ make pdf html
  $ ls -R build/
  build:
  developers  developers.pdf

  build/developers:
  dev.database.html          dev.eventref.html  dev.plugins.html  index.html
  dev.database.install.html  dev.events.html    images            LEGAL.html

For installing manuals into a specific location, such as for building manuals on web servers, first clean and build the desired DocBook manuals, and then run the install routine with the necessary install path:

  $ make clean
  $ make pdf html
  $ make INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/install install

- or for cron jobs (order matters):

  $ make INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/install clean pdf html install

Simple Build Script

Taking it one step further, there is a Python script in trunk/dev/ named docbook-manual.py that takes the following set of arguments to automate the update/build process from an SVN checkout:

  $ docbook-manual.py <mantisbt/docbook> <destination_path> [<lang> ...]

The last parameter is optional, and can be a space-separated list of docbook languages to build. The results are put into the destination directory in the form of <lang>/<manual>. An example command and resulting hierarchy:

  $ /home/user/mantisbt/trunk/dev/docbook-manual.py /home/user/mantisbt/trunk/docbook /var/www/mantis en de
  $ tree /var/www/mantis
  mantis
  -- en
  ---- administration_guide
  ---- developers
  -- de
  ---- administration_guide
  ---- developers
mantisbt/docbook.1225268730.txt.gz · Last modified: 2010/02/23 07:20 (external edit)

Driven by DokuWiki