NAME

DocSet - documentation projects builder in HTML, PS and PDF formats

SYNOPSIS

  docset_build [options] base_full_path relative_to_base_config_file_location

Options:

  -h    this help
  -v    verbose
  -i    podify pseudo-pod items (s/^* /=item */)
  -s    create the splitted html version (not implemented)
  -t    create tar.gz (not implemented)
  -p    generate PS file
  -d    generate PDF file
  -f    force a complete rebuild
  -a    print available hypertext anchors (not implemented)
  -l    perform L<> links validation in pod docs
  -e    slides mode (for presentations) (not implemented)
  -m    executed from Makefile (forces rebuild,
                                no PS/PDF file,
                                no tgz archive!)

DESCRIPTION

This package builds a docset from sources in different formats. The generated documents can be all nicely interlinked and to have the same look and feel.

Currently it knows to handle input formats:

* POD * HTML

and knows to generate:

* HTML * PS * PDF

Modification control

Each output mode maintains its own cache (per docset) which is used when certain source documents weren't modified since last build and the build is running in a non-force-rebuild mode.

Definitions:

* Chapter is a single document (file).

* Link is an URL

* Docset is a collection of docsets, chapters and links.

Application Specific Features

1.: META: not ported yet!
Generate a split version HTML, creating html file for each pod section, and having everything interlinked of course. This version is used best for the search.
2.: Complete the POD on the fly from the files in POD format. This is used to ease the generating of the presentations slides, so one can use "*" instead of a long =over/=item/.../=item/=back strings. The rest is done as before. Take a look at the special version of the html2ps format to generate nice slides in conf/html2ps-slides.conf.
3.: If you turn the slides mode on, it automatically turns the "-i" ("*" bullets preprocessing) mode and does a page break before each =head tag.

Examples

The package includes two fully working examples in the examples/ directory.

site: This example demonstrates a shrinked version of perl.apache.org (which is genrated entirely by DocSet), with many docs removed or reduced to the mininumum. There are still quite a lot of documents left so you can see the big picture. Read examples/site/README for more information.
presentation: This example demonstrates how to build presentations handouts and slides using DocSet. Read examples/presentation/README for more information.

Look-n-Feel Customization

You can customise the look and feel of the ouput by adjusting the templates in the directory examples/site/tmpl/custom.

You can change look and feel of the PS (PDF) versions by modifying examples/site/conf/html2ps.conf. Be careful that if your documentation that you want to put in one PS or PDF file is very big and you tell html2ps to put the TOC at the beginning you will need lots of memory because it won't write a single byte to the disk before it gets all the HTML markup converted to PS.

CONFIGURATION

All you have to prepare is a single config file that you then pass as an argument to "docset_build":

  % docset_build [options] base_full_path relative_to_base_config_file_location

Every directory in the source tree may have a configuration file, which designates a docset's root. See the config files for examples. Usually the file in the root (examples/site/src) sets operational directories and other arguments, which you don't have to repeat in sub-docsets. You want to redefine the build attributes in nested docsets if you want to override certain configuration attributes. Modify these files to suit your documentation project layout.

Note that the smart examples/site/bin/build script automatically locates your project's directory, so you can move your project around filesystem without changing anything. So you really build with:

  % bin/build [options]

examples/site/README explains the layout of the directories.

"DocSet::Config" manpage explains the layout of the configuration file.

Extending

Read the other manpages for more information about how to extend Docset.

PREREQUISITES

The following are the optional prerequisites:

ps2pdf
Needed to generate the PDF version.
Storable
Available from CPAN (http://cpan.org/) and is a part of the core Perl distribution of the Perl 5.8.0 and higher.

Allows source modification control, so if you modify only one file you will not have to rebuild everything to get the updated HTML/PS/PDF files.

SUPPORT

Notice that this tool relies on two tools ("ps2pdf" and "html2ps") which I don't support, since I didn't write them. So if you have any problem first make sure that it's not a problem of these tools.

Note that while "html2ps" is included in this distribution, it's written in the old style Perl, so if you have patches send them along, but I won't try to fix/modify this code otherwise. For more info see: http://www.tdb.uu.se/~jan/html2ps.html

BUGS

Huh? Probably many...

QUESTIONS

Questions can be asked at the template-docset mailing list. For mailing list archives and subscription information please see: http://template-toolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/template-docset

AUTHORS

Stas Bekman <stas (at) stason.org>

COPYRIGHT

This program is distributed under the Artistic License, like the Perl itself.

POD ERRORS

Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

Around line 73:: You have '=item 1' instead of the expected '=item 2'
Around line 81:: You have '=item 1' instead of the expected '=item 3'