HOW-TO: Compiling the Subversion Book

This Subversion Book is written in DocBook 4.4.

The goal of this document is to give simple instructions to anyone who wants to compile this book into a useful format, like HTML or PDF. It should state exactly which tools to use, and how to invoke them, in simplest terms.

Table of Contents:

I. PRIMER II. COMPILING THE DOCS III. HACKING ON THE DOCS

I. PRIMER

DocBook has a tortured, confusing history. Before you do anything, take a look at Eric Raymond's excellent "DocBook Demystification HOWTO":

 http://tldp.org/HOWTO/DocBook-Demystification-HOWTO/

It's very short and clears up many things.

II. COMPILING THE DOCS

1. Fetch XSL stylesheets for DocBook and place them in src/tools/xsl.

   The "DocBook Open Repository" on Sourceforge has a large collection of XSL stylesheets that specifically operate on DocBook. Download and install the latest 'docbook-xsl' package from this page:

   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21935

   Download the latest version of docbook-xsl, unpack it, then rename the unpacked directory to src/tools/xsl, something like this:

   $ cd src/tools $ tar zxvf docbook-xsl-X.YY.Z.tar.gz $ mv docbook-xsl-X.YY.Z xsl

   The default build process expects to the stylesheets to be in src/tools/xsl/.

2. Use XSLT to transform the book.

   XSLT applies an .xsl stylesheet to an .xml file, and produces some new markup document.

   • Get libxslt, a C library for XSLT, from http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/. (If you're having trouble finding a source package to compile, try ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/sources/libxslt/1.0/.) Install it:

     $ tar zxvf libxslt-1.0.22.tar.gz $ cd libxslt-1.0.22 $ ./configure $ ./make

     make install

     (Note: you may discover that you need to install libxml2 first. Find it at ftp://archive.progeny.com/GNOME/sources/libxml2/)

     If you don't want to compile libxslt, you can just fetch the appropriate OS binary package.

   • From this directory (en, or another language directory), do

     $ make all-html

     This produces a single-page HTML version of the book in book/svn-book.html, and a multi-page version in book/html-chunk/.

3. Make a PDF file.

   Formatting Objects (FO) is a layout language, kind of like postscript, dvi or css. People are quickly standardizing on it.

   • Fetch FOP, a java program which converts .fo files into PDF:

     http://xml.apache.org/fop/index.html

     There are approximately 17577 ways to install FOP. Rather than describe them all, we will recommend one way. If you've already installed FOP some other way, that's fine, then you can ignore the following recipe:

     1. Download the latest version from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xml/fop, for example, fop-0.20.5-bin.tar.gz. Just get a binary distribution, there's no need for the Java source.

     2. Unpack it into src/tools/fop/

        $ cd src/tools $ tar zxvf fop-0.20.5-bin.tar.gz $ mv fop-0.20.5 fop

     That should be enough. The Makefile will actually invoke src/tools/bin/run-fop.sh. That script attempts to find FOP already installed on your system, but falls back to the FOP unpacked into src/tools/fop/ if there's no other FOP available.

     Of course, to run FOP at all, you also need a Java runtime environment. Try java.sun.com or www.blackdown.org if you don't already have that.

     Sometimes building the book can use more memory than Java is willing to allocate by default, and you may need to increase the default heap size. With Sun's JVM, this is accomplished by passing the arguments "-Xms100m -Xmx200m" (known to work with versions 1.2.x-1.4.x, and likely different for JVMs from other vendors). To tell fop.sh about these arguments, pass them via the environment variable FOP_OPTS (which is also configurable in your ~/.foprc).

     $ export FOP_OPTS="-Xms100m -Xmx200m"

   • If you want images to be included in the PDF, you'll need to use the JIMI image processing library. Grab the latest release from http://java.sun.com/products/jimi/, then cp the jar file into the same place as the FOP jar files:

     $ cd src/tools $ tar zxvf jimi1_0.tar.Z $ cp Jimi/examples/AppletDemo/JimiProClasses.jar fop/lib/

     Poof! You now have PNG support.

   • From this directory (en, or another language directory), do

     $ make all-pdf

     This produces PDF for the book in book/svn-book.pdf.

III. HACKING ON THE DOCS

In addition to everything in section II:

1. Get a nice editing environment for SGML/XML.

   This isn't strictly required, but it's nice when your editor colorizes things, understands the DTD, tells you what tags you can insert, etc.

   If you use emacs, we recommend the PSGML major-mode. Most free operating systems package it, or its home page is here:

    http://www.lysator.liu.se/projects/about_psgml.html

   If you use vim, you might check out xmledit, at:

    http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=301

2. Get a validating parser.

   Actually, if you have what you need to compile the documentation, then you almost certainly have an XML validator installed already - it is called xmllint, and comes as part of libxml2.

   The makefile is preconfigured with a suitable invocation of it, so simply run:

   $ make valid

3. Read about DocBook.

   You'll want to get real intimate with a DocBook reference, such as can be found at: http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/