Our Manual is written in DocBook and we generate HTML and CHM manuals for distributing.
The user's manual is XML, so you can use XML editor or your favourite text editor. Note that XML requires document to be well formed, unlike HTML, before it can be processed. So if possible, make sure your DocBook is well formed before submitting document patches.
See these tutorials for editing DocBook:
Note: For screenshots we prefer the PNG format. Only for images (for example icons), where we want transparency, we use the GIF format, since older browsers have problems with transparent PNG images.
The hard way: libxml and xsltproc
Easier with complete command-line environment:
Cygwin contains needed tools:
Our preferred build system based on Java and Saxon.
Our preferred build system uses the following tools:
The easiest way is to download our manual build tools package v1. The package contains required tools for
manual building. Java Runtime (JRE)
is the only external requirement. Installing the tools is easy - just unzip the
tools package to folder /Docs/Users/Manual/build.
The batch files are also located at the same build subfolder.
The main file is build.bat. Paths to the installed tools are written in the configuration.bat file.
build.bat html or build_html.bathtml subdirectory at the build directory.build.bat html withads or build_html.bat withadshtml subdirectory at the build directory.build.bat htmlhelp or build_htmlhelp.bathtmlhelp subdirectory at the build directory.build.batbuild.bat html.