Publican

This page serves as a central location for all things related to Publican.

Note: Publican was formerly known as Documentation-Devel.

Public Announcement

The semi-official announcement is at: http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2008-February/msg00091.html.

Here is the text:

>From Brian Forte:

---

Brisbane, Queensland, 2008/02/14 -- Red Hat Engineering Content Services is pleased to announce Publican, a new publishing package.

Publican -- which has been used by Red Hat's Documentation Group for almost two years -- takes DocBook XML input and outputs HTML, plain Unicode text and PDF. This output can be branded with the following brands: Fedora, Red Hat, and JBoss. A default, generic brand is also included. Further brands can be added, either by request, or by direct customisation. (To request an additional brand, submit a bug via <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/>. Submit the bug against the "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" product, and the "publican" component.)

But "make html" and "make pdf" are, perhaps, the least of Publican. What makes Publican worth announcing are "create_book" and "make dist-srpm".

"create_book" does what the command name implies: it creates a directory of the XML files you need to start writing a book or article using DocBook XML as well as a ready-to-roll Makefile for outputting HTML, text and PDF.

"make dist-srpm" takes a book, turns it into a tarball, adds an appropriate specfile and then wraps the whole thing up into a src.rpm. This makes it easy to incorporate documentation into the standard distribution build chain.

Publican is being incorporated into the Fedora tree in the coming days and weeks. To learn more, members of the Publican development and documentation team will be answering questions in #fedora-docs on irc.freenode.net on Thursday 2008/02/14 from 12:00 Australian Eastern Standard Time (2008/02/14 02:00 UTC/GMT; 2008/02/14 IST; 2008/02/13 22:00 American EDT; 2008/02/13 19:00 American PDT).

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Kind Regards,

Murray.

Publican List

Publican list is used to inform users of the current Publican version, upgrades and changes, bug fixes, and for Publican discussions.

All writers and translators are encouraged to subscribe:

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/publican-list

IRC Log of Publican Meeting

The meeting referenced above was held as scheduled on Thursday, 14 February at 0200 UTC. The transcript can be read here .

Documentation for Publican

https://fedorahosted.org/publican/

Unofficial Packages for Publican

First. download the following yum repo file and place in /etc/yum/yum.repos.d/:

http://bjensen.fedorapeople.org/pkgs/docs/fedora-docs.repo

Next, run

yum install publican-doc publican-fedora

Note: If you are running Fedora 9 Alpha, you can just run the above yum command. The Publican packages are already in the F9 development repositories.