No special tools are needed to edit DocBook files, but in order to build DocBook manuals, you need to have a DocBook tool chain installed on your system, including GNU Make, OpenJade, and various DocBook tools.
The command below installs the toolchain on Ubuntu-based systems (tested successfully on Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.04 desktop)
$ sudo apt-get install docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-slides docbook-utils linuxdoc-tools make openjade xmlto
For Debian-based Linux distributions, simply install the necessary packages with the following command:
$ sudo aptitude install docbook docbook-dsssl docbook-slides docbook-utils linuxdoc-tools make openjade xmlto
For Fedora-based distros, run this command instead:
$ su -c 'yum groupinstall "Authoring and Publishing"'
To build the docbook in the master branch, additional package
publican is required.
We will use the Developer's Guide in English as the example manual for this process, which is in the
developers/en/ directory. You can substitute any other manual or language, assuming the manual exists and has been translated to that language.
Enter the directory containing the preferred manual:
$ cd /path/to/mantisbt/docbook/adminguide/en
make with a list of resulting file types that you want to build. Currently, our DocBook manuals can produce PDF, HTML (split or single page), RTF, Postscript, or plain-text manuals. All resulting manual files will be placed in the
build/ subdirectory. In this example, we will build both a PDF and a split HTML manual:
$ make pdf html $ ls -R build/ build: developers developers.pdf build/developers: dev.database.html dev.eventref.html dev.plugins.html index.html dev.database.install.html dev.events.html images LEGAL.html
For installing manuals into a specific location, such as for building manuals on web servers, first clean and build the desired DocBook manuals, and then run the install routine with the necessary install path:
$ make clean $ make pdf html $ make INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/install install
- or for cron jobs (order matters):
$ make INSTALL_DIR=/path/to/install clean pdf html install
Taking it one step further, there is a Python script in
docbook-manual.py that takes the following set of arguments to automate the update/build process from an SVN checkout:
$ docbook-manual.py <mantisbt/docbook> <destination_path> [<lang> ...]
The last parameter is optional, and can be a space-separated list of docbook languages to build. The results are put into the destination directory in the form of
<lang>/<manual>. An example command and resulting hierarchy:
$ /home/user/mantisbt/trunk/dev/docbook-manual.py /home/user/mantisbt/trunk/docbook /var/www/mantis en de $ tree /var/www/mantis mantis -- en ---- administration_guide ---- developers -- de ---- administration_guide ---- developers