Documentation which is written in Docbook XML can be quite easily converted into other formats. This page deals with converting to HTML and PDF.

Building HTML Documentation

1. Set up a copy of the docteam bzr branch as described on Repository page. Choose the appropriate branch for the version of Ubuntu documentation you wish to build.

2. Install at least the following packages: make, gettext and docbook-xsl.

3. Type:

   make all

This command will build HTML versions of all the documents available.

The command uses docbook-xsl templates to customise the output of the html. The majority of the templates used are supplied by the docbook-xsl package, but some custom templates are used to create the Ubuntu theme. These custom templates can be found in the libs/ directory of the branch and are called by the Makefile. For more information about docbook-xsl, please see the Docbook XSL: The Complete Guide.

There are a number of other make targets which you can use to build specific or miscellaneous documents. Read through the Makefile to discover what these are.

You will see a lot of warnings like the following, which can be safely ignored:

• No localization exists for "c" or "". Using default "en".

Since Ubuntu 7.04, the Ubuntu system documentation has split into several categories, many of which link between them using an internal Gnome/KDE linking system. When the documents are converted into HTML, this results in a lot of links being broken. For this reason we use a script called fix-urls.sh to correct the broken internal links. This script is run automatically as part of the make all command described above.

Updating help.ubuntu.com

The static pages on help.ubuntu.com (as opposed to the community wiki) are kept updated by pushing the HTML documents built to a specific bzr branch on Launchpad.

The contents of the help.ubuntu.com bzr branch are generally identical to the output of the make all command described in the previous section, subject to the following exceptions:

• A custom index.html page is used which is not part of the build process. The index.html page which is produced by the build process is discarded.

• A copy of the Ubuntu installation guide is added to the build process together with a custom index.html page. See the install target in the Makefile for information about how this is done.

The Canonical Sysadmins are responsible for updating help.ubuntu.com from the bzr branch. It is intended that the updates will be pulled automatically in the future.

Note: the HTML documentation on help.ubuntu.com should always reflect the documentation as it appears in the applicable version of Ubuntu. Changes to the help.ubuntu.com branch should not be made without the StableReleaseUpdates procedure first being followed and an equivalent change being made to the mainline bzr branch for the Ubuntu version concerned.

Building Translated HTML

If building translated copies of the documentation, you will need to adjust the Makefile and substitute your language code for the LN variable defined near the top of the Makefile.

You may also wish to modify the header and footer details. These can be found in the libs/ubuntu-banner.xsl file.

Building PDF

To build PDF, we currently use a tool called Apache Fop.

Currently, the only document which we build a PDF version of is the Ubuntu Server Guide. To build a PDF version of the Server Guide, install the fop package and run the following command from an ubuntu-doc branch:

• make serverguide-pdf

If you are interested in building other documents, read the serverguide-pdf target in the Makefile for more information.

CategoryDocteam