The Documentation Project

Packaged documentation is available in both HTML and Postscript formats. These are available as part of the standard Postgres installation. We discuss here working with the documentation sources and generating documentation packages.

The documentation sources are written using SGML markup of plain text files. The purpose of DocBook SGML is to allow an author to specify the structure and content of a technical document (using the DocBook DTD), and to have a document style define how that content is rendered into a final form (e.g. using Norm Walsh's Modular Style Sheets).

See Introduction to DocBook for a nice "quickstart" summary of DocBook features. DocBook Elements provides a powerful cross-reference for features of DocBook.

This documentation set is constructed using several tools, including James Clark's jade and Norm Walsh's Modular DocBook Stylesheets.

Currently, hardcopy is produced by importing Rich Text Format (RTF) output from jade into ApplixWare for minor formatting fixups, then exporting as a Postscript file.

TeX is a supported format for jade output, but is not used at this time for several reasons, including the inability to make minor format fixes before committing to hardcopy and generally inadequate table support in the TeX stylesheets.