Chapter 5. The Documentation Build Process

Table of Contents
5.1. Rendering DocBook into Output
5.2. The FreeBSD Documentation Build Toolset
5.3. Understanding Makefiles in the Documentation Tree
5.4. FreeBSD Documentation Project Make Includes

This chapter covers organization of the documentation build process and how make(1) is used to control it.

5.1. Rendering DocBook into Output

Different types of output can be produced from a single DocBook source file. The type of output desired is set with the FORMATS variable. A list of known formats is stored in KNOWN_FORMATS:

% cd ~/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook
% make -V KNOWN_FORMATS
Table 5.1. Common Output Formats
FORMATS ValueFile TypeDescription
htmlHTML, one fileA single book.html or article.html.
html-splitHTML, multiple filesMultiple HTML files, one for each chapter or section, for use on a typical web site.
pdfPDFPortable Document Format

The default output format can vary by document, but is usually html-split. Other formats are chosen by setting FORMATS to a specific value. Multiple output formats can be created at a single time by setting FORMATS to a list of formats.

Example 5.1. Build a Single HTML Output File
% cd ~/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook
% make FORMATS=html

Example 5.2. Build HTML-Split and PDF Output Files
% cd ~/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook
% make FORMATS="html-split pdf"

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/

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