Re: [avrdude-dev] Documentation build tools requirements - many complaints

[Brian Dean]

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:06:15PM +0100, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> > My only limitation that I currently have is figuring out how to
> > convert DocBook to PDF. Cygwin doesn't seem to have a quick and easy
> > solution out of the box. The "xmlto" that comes with Cygwin can
> > convert DocBook to FO (among other things), but it stops there. No
> > direct to PDF.
> 
> Can you create PS?  From there, it's easy to go to PDF (using
> Ghostscript).

I played around with docbook a while back to use for my product
manuals.  The processing is pretty simple, dusting off my Makefile, I
have this:

TARGET = manual

all : ${TARGET}.pdf

${TARGET}.pdf : ${TARGET}.fo
       fop -fo ${TARGET}.fo -pdf ${TARGET}.pdf

${TARGET}.fo : ${TARGET}.xml
      xsltproc --output ${TARGET}.fo --stringparam use.extensions 0 
/usr/local/share/xsl/docbook-xsl/fo/docbook.xsl ${TARGET}.xml

xsltproc comes from the FreeBSD port textproc/libxslt and the 'fop'
program comes from the FreeBSD textproc/fop port.  I haven't got this
set of tools completely working on my Mac yet, but 'fop' is used to go
from the .fo file to PDF.

I do like the idea of using docbook.  There's at least a gap in my
understanding of how to use it to generate man pages, though.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
BDMICRO - ATmega128 Based MAVRIC Controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/