diff --git a/src/doc/user/00README.txt b/src/doc/user/00README.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..99c22639 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/doc/user/00README.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ += Building the Recoll user manual + +The Recoll user manual usually used DocBook SGML and used the FreeBSD doc +toolchain to produce the output formats. This had the advantage of an easy +way to produce all formats including a PDF manual, but presented two +problems: + + - Dependancy on the FreeBSD platform. + - No support for UTF-8 (last I looked), only latin1. + +The manual is now compatible with XML. There is a small script that +converts the SGML (but XML-compatible) manual into XML (changes the header, +mostly). The SGML version is still the primary one. + +Beyond fixing a few missing closing tags, the main change that had to be +made was to make the anchors explicitly upper-case because the SGML +toolchain converts them to upper-case and the XML one does not, so the only +way to have compatibility is to make them upper-case in the first place. + +We still have a problem for producing the PDF manual, because few +straightforward approaches seem to exist: + + - http://docbookpublishing.com qui a meme une version programmatique (cf: + http://docbookpublishing.com/api/), mais necessite un peu de + configuration. + - FOP but this is Java and complicated. + +See also http://www.valdyas.org/linguistics/printing_unicode.html +Does not look simple, but dates from 2002 and seems to imply that FOP is +making progress. + +The current conclusion would seem to be that the SGML version should stay +operational to give an easy way to make the PDF one on FreeBSD.