DocBook

The standard markup language used by the DocsProject. Refer to the DocBook home page for everything DocBook.

Getting started

Good reading

• Quick crash course
• Self-referential tutorial
• Dated but useful for understanding

Publican toolchain

Fedora Docs uses a toolchain that wraps around DocBook building tools.

• Publican Users Guide
• Project pages

To install publican from the command line:

su -c 'yum install publican'

Once installed, you can use the create_book command to generate a new, empty book that you can begin writing in immediately. It serves as a self-referential toolchain tutorial.

Example tutorial

In addition to the Self DocBook sef-referential tutorial, the DocsProject maintains an example tutorial that shows beginners how to get started using DocBook, using a simple "show and tell" format. After you click the above link to the tutorial , choose "(As text)" at the top, and save the resulting page. Then open the page in your favorite editor. Most editors, such as vi, Emacs, and gEdit, use "syntax highlighting" to make the document very easy to read.

Complete Reference

"DocBook: The Definitive Guide" (often called "The DocBook Book" or "TDG"), available at the site, has a complete reference of all tags used in DocBook. The DocsProject currently uses version 4.4 of the DocBook DTD. The reference in TDG shows you which tags belong to newer versions of the DocBook DTD, so you don't violate the specification when you are writing your documents. You can download or read the book here:

• http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html

Creating DocBook using common tools

The Documentation Guide explains how to configure vi and Emacs for DocBook support.

OpenOffice.org has some limited capabilities for producing DocBook XML from documents that adhere to strict use of built-in styles. See ["DocsProject/OOoDocBook"] for information on using OpenOffice.org Writer for working with DocBook.

Users can export pages from this wiki to DocBook. To ease the conversion process, refer to the guidelines found at Docs/WritingUsingTheWiki .

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