Toolsets

We have documented experience with three installation methods for the various tools that are needed to process the documentation. One is installation from RPMs on Linux, the second is installation from FreeBSD port, and the last is a general installation from original distributions of the individual tools. These will be described below.

There may be some other packaged distributions for these tools. Please report package status to the docs mailing list and we will include that information here.

Linux RPM Installation

The simplest installation for a RedHat-compatible Linux system uses the RPM set developed by Mark Galassi at Cygnus. It should also be possible to install from sources, as described in a subsequent section.

Installing RPMs

  1. Install RPMs for Jade and related packages.

  2. Install Norm Walsh's latest style sheets. Depending on the age of the RPMs, the latest style sheets may be substantially improved from those contained in the RPMs.

  3. Update your src/Makefile.custom to include HSTYLE and PSTYLE definitions pointing to the style sheets.

FreeBSD Installation

There is a full set of ports of the documentation tools available on FreeBSD. In fact, postgresql.org, on which documentation is automatically updated every evening, is a FreeBSD machine.

Installing FreeBSD Ports

  1. To build the documentation on FreeBSD a number of ports will need to be installed.

    % cd /usr/ports/devel/gmake && make install
    % cd /usr/ports/textproc/docproj && make install
    % cd /usr/ports/textproc/docbook && make install
    % cd /usr/ports/textproc/dsssl-docbook-modular && make install
          

  2. Set environment variables to access the jade toolset.

    Note: This was not required for the FreeBSD machine at postgresql.org, so you may not have to do this.

    export SMGL_ROOT=/usr/local/share/sgml                                          
    SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/usr/local/share/sgml/jade/catalog                           
    SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/usr/local/share/sgml/html/catalog:$SGML_CATALOG_FILES       
    SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/usr/local/share/sgml/iso8879/catalog:$SGML_CATALOG_FILES    
    SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/usr/local/share/sgml/transpec/catalog:$SGML_CATALOG_FILES   
    SGML_CATALOG_FILES=/usr/local/share/sgml/docbook/catalog:$SGML_CATALOG_FILES    
    export SGML_CATALOG_FILES
          
    (this is sh/bash syntax; adjust accordingly for csh/tcsh).

  3. Make needs some special arguments, or these need to be added to your Makefile.custom:

    HSTYLE=/usr/local/share/sgml/docbook/dsssl/modular/html/ 
    PSTYLE=/usr/local/share/sgml/docbook/dsssl/modular/print/
          
    Of course you'll need to use gmake rather than just plain 'make' to build.

Debian Installation

There is a full set of packages of the documentation tools available for Debian.

Installing Debian Packages

  1. Install jade, docbook, and unzip:

    apt-get install jade
    apt-get install docbook
    apt-get install docbook-stylesheets
          

  2. Install the latest style sheets.

    1. Verify that unzip is installed, or install the package:

      apt-get install unzip
      	

    2. Grab the latest stylesheet zipballs from http://www.nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl and unzip it somewhere (possibly /usr/share).

  3. Edit src/Makefile.custom to add appropriate HSTYLE and PSTYLE definitions:

    HSTYLE= /usr/share/docbook/html
    PSTYLE= /usr/share/docbook/print
          

Manual Installation of Tools

This is a brief run-through of the process of obtaining and installing the software you'll need to edit DocBook source with Emacs and process it with Norman Walsh's DSSSL style sheets to create HTML and RTF.

The easiest way to obtain the SGML and DocBook tools may be to get sgmltools from sgmltools. sgmltools requires the GNU version of m4. To confirm that you have the correct version of m4 available, try

gnum4 --version
    

If you install GNU m4, install it with the name gnum4 and sgmltools will find it. After the install, you will have sgmltools, jade, and Norm Walsh's DocBook style sheets. The instructions below are for installing these tools separately.

Prerequisites

What you need:

What you must fetch:

Important URLs:

Installing Jade

Installing Jade

  1. Read the installation instructions at the above listed URL.

  2. Unzip the distribution kit in a suitable place. The command to do this will be something like

    unzip -aU jade1_1.zip
           

  3. Jade is not built using GNU autoconf, so you'll need to edit a Makefile yourself. Since James Clark has been good enough to prepare his kit for it, it is a good idea to make a build directory (named for your machine architecture, perhaps) under the main directory of the Jade distribution, copy the file Makefile from the main directory into it, edit it there, and then run make there.

    However, the Makefile does need to be edited. There is a file called Makefile.jade in the main directory, which is intended to be used with make -f Makefile.jade when building Jade (as opposed to just SP, the SGML parser kit that Jade is built upon). We suggest that you don't do that, though, since there is more that you need to change than what is in Makefile.jade, so you'd have to edit one of them anyway.

    Go through the Makefile, reading James' instructions and editing as needed. There are various variables that need to be set. Here is a collected summary of the most important ones, with typical values:

    prefix = /usr/local
    XDEFINES = -DSGML_CATALOG_FILES_DEFAULT=\"/usr/local/share/sgml/catalog\"
    XLIBS = -lm
    RANLIB = ranlib
    srcdir = ..
    XLIBDIRS = grove spgrove style
    XPROGDIRS = jade
           
    Note the specification of where to find the default catalog of SGML support files -- you may want to change that to something more suitable for your own installation. If your system doesn't need the above settings for the math library and the ranlib command, leave them as they are in the Makefile.

  4. Type make to build Jade and the various SP tools.

  5. Once the software is built, make install will do the obvious.

Installing the DocBook DTD Kit

Installing the DocBook DTD Kit

  1. You'll want to place the files that make up the DocBook DTD kit in the directory you built Jade to expect them in, which, if you followed our suggestion above, is /usr/local/share/sgml/. In addition to the actual DocBook files, you'll need to have a catalog file in place, for the mapping of document type specifications and external entity references to actual files in that directory. You'll also want the ISO character set mappings, and probably one or more versions of HTML.

    One way to install the various DTD and support files and set up the catalog file, is to collect them all into the above mentioned directory, use a single file named CATALOG to describe them all, and then create the file catalog as a catalog pointer to the former, by giving it the single line of content:

    CATALOG /usr/local/share/sgml/CATALOG
           

  2. The CATALOG file should then contain three types of lines. The first is the (optional) SGML declaration, thus:

    SGMLDECL docbook.dcl
           
    Next, the various references to DTD and entity files must be resolved. For the DocBook files, these lines look like this:
    PUBLIC "-//Davenport//DTD DocBook V3.0//EN" docbook.dtd
    PUBLIC "-//USA-DOD//DTD Table Model 951010//EN" cals-tbl.dtd
    PUBLIC "-//Davenport//ELEMENTS DocBook Information Pool V3.0//EN" dbpool.mod
    PUBLIC "-//Davenport//ELEMENTS DocBook Document Hierarchy V3.0//EN" dbhier.mod
    PUBLIC "-//Davenport//ENTITIES DocBook Additional General Entities V3.0//EN" dbgenent.mod
           

  3. Of course, a file containing these comes with the DocBook kit. Note that the last item on each of these lines is a file name, given here without a path. You can put the files in subdirectories of your main SGML directory if you like, of course, and modify the reference in the CATALOG file. DocBook also references the ISO character set entities, so you need to fetch and install these (they are available from several sources, and are easily found by way of the URLs listed above), along with catalog entries for all of them, such as:

    PUBLIC "ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN" ISO/ISOlat1
           
    Note how the file name here contains a directory name, showing that we've placed the ISO entity files in a subdirectory named ISO. Again, proper catalog entries should accompany the entity kit you fetch.

Installing Norman Walsh's DSSSL Style Sheets

Installing Norman Walsh's DSSSL Style Sheets

  1. Read the installation instructions at the above listed URL.

  2. To install Norman's style sheets, simply unzip the distribution kit in a suitable place. A good place to dot this would be /usr/local/share, which places the kit in a directory tree under /usr/local/share/docbook. The command will be something like

    unzip -aU db119.zip
           

  3. One way to test the installation is to build the HTML and RTF forms of the PostgreSQL User's Guide.

    1. To build the HTML files, go to the SGML source directory, doc/src/sgml, and say

      jade -t sgml -d /usr/local/share/docbook/html/docbook.dsl -D ../graphics postgres.sgml
      	 

      book1.htm is the top level node of the output..

    2. To generate the RTF output, ready for importing into your favorite word processing system and printing, type:

      jade -t rtf -d /usr/local/share/docbook/print/docbook.dsl -D ../graphics postgres.sgml
      	 

Installing PSGML

Installing PSGML

  1. Read the installation instructions at the above listed URL.

  2. Unpack the distribution file, run configure, make and make install to put the byte-compiled files and info library in place.

  3. Then add the following lines to your /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el file to make Emacs properly load PSGML when needed:

    (setq load-path
          (cons "/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/psgml" load-path))
    (autoload 'sgml-mode "psgml" "Major mode to edit SGML files." t)
           

  4. If you want to use PSGML when editing HTML too, also add this:

    (setq auto-mode-alist
          (cons '("\\.s?html?\\'" . sgml-mode) auto-mode-alist))
           

  5. There is one important thing to note with PSGML: its author assumed that your main SGML DTD directory would be /usr/local/lib/sgml. If, as in the examples in this chapter, you use /usr/local/share/sgml, you have to compensate for this.

    1. You can set the SGML_CATALOG_FILES environment variable.

    2. You can customize your PSGML installation (its manual tells you how).

    3. You can even edit the source file psgml.el before compiling and installing PSGML, changing the hard-coded paths to match your own default.

Installing JadeTeX

If you want to, you can also install JadeTeX to use TeX as a formatting backend for Jade. Note that this is still quite unpolished software, and will generate printed output that is inferior to what you get from the RTF backend. Still, it works all right, especially for simpler documents that don't use tables, and as both JadeTeX and the style sheets are under continuous improvement, it will certainly get better over time.

To install and use JadeTeX, you will need a working installation of TeX and LaTeX2e, including the supported tools and graphics packages, Babel, AMS fonts and AMS-LaTeX, the PSNFSS extension and companion kit of "the 35 fonts", the dvips program for generating PostScript, the macro packages fancyhdr, hyperref, minitoc, url and ot2enc, and of course JadeTeX itself. All of these can be found on your friendly neighborhood CTAN site.

JadeTeX does not at the time of writing come with much of an installation guide, but there is a makefile which shows what is needed. It also includes a directory cooked, wherein you'll find some of the macro packages it needs, but not all, and not complete -- at least last we looked.

Before building the jadetex.fmt format file, you'll probably want to edit the jadetex.ltx file, to change the configuration of Babel to suit your locality. The line to change looks something like

\RequirePackage[german,french,english]{babel}[1997/01/23]
     
and you should obviously list only the languages you actually need, and have configured Babel for.

With JadeTeX working, you should be able to generate and format TeX output for the PostgreSQL manuals by giving the commands (as above, in the doc/src/sgml directory)

jade -t tex -d /usr/local/share/docbook/print/docbook.dsl -D ../graphics postgres.sgml
jadetex postgres.tex
jadetex postgres.tex
dvips postgres.dvi
     
Of course, when you do this, TeX will stop during the second run, and tell you that its capacity has been exceeded. This is, as far as we can tell, because of the way JadeTeX generates cross referencing information. TeX can, of course, be compiled with larger data structure sizes. The details of this will vary according to your installation.