[TriLUG] docbook & help guides

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 11:06, Douglas Kojetin wrote:
> hi all-
> 
> i am in the process of setting up some help documents for my lab, and 
> think that formatting them similar to the linux help docs might be the 
> best way. i've briefly read up and see that i need to use 'docbook' (i 
> was going to choose XML).
> 
> my question is, what do i need (on the webserver end) to produce the 
> single page HTML, multi page HTML and PDF documents?
> 
> thanks,
> doug


Hi Doug,

We're in similar positions!  I've just started converting the "non-math"
documentation for our group into DocBook using The Linux Documentation
Project's style files.

And using Red Hat 9, its been pretty easy.  I just did (and recommend)
the following:

  1) Get a copy of "ldp.dsl" from tldp.org and some sample *.sgml 
     files to use as examples

  2) Create your own "*.sgml" document [I used emacs which had
     some helpful built-in mode stuff but any text editor is fine]

  3) Convert it to the formats you want.  I used the standard 
     "db2*" commands as distributed with RH 9 :

        db2ps -d ldp.dsl devel_HOWTO.sgml
        db2pdf -d ldp.dsl devel_HOWTO.sgml
        db2html -d ./ldp.dsl devel_HOWTO.sgml
        db2html -u -d ./ldp.dsl devel_HOWTO.sgml

     to get both single ("-u") and multi-file HTML formats.

  4) Put the files wherever you want on your web server.  I'm 
     running more or less the basic Apache as configured by 
     default by Red Hat on some of our machines so you really 
     don't need any fancy "server-side" things.

     Also, I've found that you may want to add some soft-links 
     with helpful names like "index.html" such as:

       cp -r DOC_NAME /path/to/html/dir
       cd /path/to/html/dir/DOC_NAME
       ln -s t1.htm index.html

     to make it easier for folks to find the start of 
     individual documents.  But other than that you're done.

Anyway, good luck with DocBook!

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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