doc/book/README

HOW-TO:  Compiling the Subversion Book
======================================

This Subversion Book is written in Docbook Lite, a scaled-down version
of the Docbook DTD, used by O'Reilly & Associates.

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.

  Note that there are actually two DocBook documents here: The book
  itself, "Subversion: The Definitive Guide", and a miscellaneous
  holding area known only as the "misc docs" (e.g., misc-docs.pdf,
  etc).  The Misc Docs hold material that either isn't yet ready to go
  into the Definitive Guide, or which may never go into the Guide but
  instead into companion documents that will also be available from
  the Subversion site.  Think of Misc Docs as a temporary, but
  published, holding area.


II. COMPILING THE DOCS


1. Fetch XSL stylesheets for Docbook and place them in 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 tools/xsl, something like this:

      $ cd doc/book/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
   tools/xsl/.  If you already have them installed elsewhere on your
   system, you can change the variable XSL_DIR in doc/book/Makefile.


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 the book directory, do 

        make all-html

     This produces an HTML version of the book in book/book.html, and
     HTML for the miscellaneous docs in misc-docs/misc-docs.html.

         
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 from 
           http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/xml/fop, for example,
           fop-0.20.4-bin.tar.gz.  Just get a binary distribution,
           there's no need for the Java source.

        2. Unpack it into tools/fop/

           $ cd doc/book/tools
           $ tar zxvf fop-0.20.4-bin.tar.gz
           $ mv fop-0.20.4 fop

     That should be enough.  The Makefile will actually invoke
     tools/bin/run-fop.sh.  That script attempts to find FOP already
     installed on your system, but falls back to the FOP unpacked into
     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 doc/book/tools/
        $ tar zxvf jimi1_0.tar.Z
        $ cp Jimi/examples/AppletDemo/JimiProClasses.jar fop/lib/

     Poof!  You now have PNG support.

   * From the book directory, do

        make all-pdf

     This produces PDF for the book in book/book.pdf, and
     PDF for the miscellaneous docs in misc-docs/misc-docs.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.

   We recommend nsgmls, a parser written by James Clark:
   http://www.jclark.com/sp/nsgmls.  It's nice to check that the XML
   you write has matching tags, and follows the DTD correctly.

   Here is one command you can use to validate your xml:

   $ SP_CHARSET_FIXED=YES SP_ENCODING=XML nsgmls -wxml \
       -mdeclaration/xml.soc  -ges                     \
       /path/to/your/declaration/xml.dcl book.xml



3. Read about the DocBook lite tags.

   The tools area contains the readme-dblite.html file which describes
   how to write with DocBook Lite.  Familiarize yourself with these
   tags before changing the docs.