Documentation Components

The Docbook based Gnucash documentation makes use of several components to produce the different output forms. See also the README file.

Supported Output formats

Our primary target is the context sensitive help F1 for the program. It's format is OS dependent:

• Docbook - current source format:
  • for Gnome's Yelp (+ .OMF for its catalog rarian, but only up to yelp version 2.23 [IRC log]),
• HTML - currently processed by gdp:2002 stylesheets
  • plain for MacOs's browser,
  • compiled for Windows help viewer,
  • plain for KDE's Khelpcenter (+ .desktop for its catalog) - currently not implemented.

Additional supported are for offline reading - processed by standard stylesheets:

• PDF
• Mobi
• ePub

Source file templates

Current Source files have a marker

<!--
      (Do not remove this comment block.)
  Template Maintained by the GNOME Documentation Project:
	  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp
  Template version: 2.0 beta
  Template last modified Feb 12, 2002
-->

Fell (talk) considers replacement by Gnome Doc Utils.

Processing

XML

The processing is done by Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), where xsltproc applies on the elements of the source XML file the instructions of the respective XSL file.

For that reason the repository contains in the xsl directory

• a copy of docbook-xsl, currently 2018 in version 1.79.2 in a respective named subdirectory and
• in the directories stylesheet and xsl itself that of the GNOME Documentation Project from 2002 [commit changes to move to gdp stylesheets, generate html files in sub…] . They expect at least DocBook XML 4.1.2, which requires at least docbook-xsl-1.45.

Additional there are .png images in stylesheets, copied from (an old version of) docbook-xslt/images. We should consider an update.

xsl/README suggests to verify, that

xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunk.xsl

returns a local path. If not read xmlsoft.org's Catalog support and run the script from DocBook

After you installed docbook-xsl locally, you should have its reference documentation under file:///usr/share/doc/packages/docbook-xsl-stylesheets/html/index.html. For the HowTo see Bob Stayton's DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide.

Because we use a standard xsl package we should not adjust them or we had to track our patches. Instead we can use a CSS

OMF

Our omf.make has in its header

#	This file was taken from scrollkeeper_example2, a package illustrating
#	how to install documentation and OMF files for use with ScrollKeeper
#	0.3.x and 0.4.x.  For more information, see:
#		http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/	
# 	Version: 0.1.2 (last updated: March 20, 2002)

Alternatives to docbook-xslt

by yelp

Yelp offers its own tools and stylesheets [1], which are significant smaller: file:///usr/share/yelp-xsl/xslt.

yelp-build can process

• from: Mallard, DocBook, man, info, and HTML documents
• to: HTML, EPUB, ...

It might be useful to run sometimes yelp-check to verify the compatibility.

by GDU

is based on the usually make and has his own xslts, too: file:///usr/share/xml/gnome/xslt