boostbook/doc/documenting.xml
Daniel James 6fee699059 Update link to table tutorial in the boostbook documentation.
Merged revisions 47362 via svnmerge from 
https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk

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  r47362 | danieljames | 2008-07-12 20:16:17 +0100 (Sat, 12 Jul 2008) | 1 line
  
  Update link to table tutorial.
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[SVN r47363]
2008-07-12 19:30:45 +00:00

255 lines
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XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
Copyright (c) 2002 Douglas Gregor <doug.gregor -at- gmail.com>
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
(See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
-->
<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//Boost//DTD BoostBook XML V1.0//EN"
"http://www.boost.org/tools/boostbook/dtd/boostbook.dtd">
<chapter xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" id="boostbook.documenting"
last-revision="$Date$">
<title>Documenting libraries</title>
<para>BoostBook is an extension to <ulink
url="http://www.docbook.org">DocBook</ulink>, an XML format for
representing documentation. BoostBook inherits much of its
functionality and many elements from DocBook that are not
redocumented here. When writing BoostBook documentation, please
refer also to <ulink
url="http://docbook.org/tdg/en/index.html">DocBook: The Definitive
Guide</ulink>.</para>
<section id="boostbook.defining">
<title>Defining a BoostBook library</title>
<para>BoostBook library documentation is contained entirely within
a &lt;library&gt; XML element. To create a skeletal library, we
need to create a new XML document (call it <code>any.xml</code>)
that contains basic information about the library. The following
<link linkend="boostbook.documenting.skeletal">BoostBook XML
example</link> describes basic information about the <ulink
url="http://www.boost.org/libs/any/index.html">Boost.Any</ulink>
library:</para>
<example id="boostbook.documenting.skeletal">
<title>A Skeletal BoostBook Library</title>
<programlisting>
&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE library PUBLIC "-//Boost//DTD BoostBook XML V1.0//EN"
"http://www.boost.org/tools/boostbook/dtd/boostbook.dtd"&gt;
&lt;library name="Any" dirname="any" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
id="any" last-revision="$Date$"&gt;
&lt;libraryinfo&gt;
&lt;author&gt;
&lt;firstname&gt;Kevlin&lt;/firstname&gt;
&lt;surname&gt;Henney&lt;/surname&gt;
&lt;/author&gt;
&lt;librarypurpose&gt;
Safe, generic container for single values of different value types
&lt;/librarypurpose&gt;
&lt;librarycategory name="category:data-structures"/&gt;
&lt;/libraryinfo&gt;
&lt;/library&gt;
</programlisting>
</example>
<para>The first three lines identify this document as a BoostBook
<ulink url="http://www.w3.org/XML/">XML</ulink> document. The
DOCTYPE line states that the document conforms to the BoostBook
DTD, and that the top-level element is a BoostBook
&lt;library&gt;.</para>
<para>The &lt;library&gt; element actually describes the aspects
of BoostBook library documentation. The attributes for the
&lt;library&gt; element are:</para>
<variablelist>
<title>Attributes for the &lt;library&gt; element</title>
<varlistentry>
<term><code>name</code></term>
<listitem>
<simpara>The full name of the library, e.g., "Any"</simpara>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><code>dirname</code></term>
<listitem>
<simpara>The name of the directory, relative to
<code>boost/libs</code>, in which the library
resides. This name may be a relative path, such as
<code>math/octonion</code>, using "/" for the directory
separator.</simpara>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><code>id</code></term>
<listitem>
<simpara>A short, unique name for the library. For libraries
with simple directory names (e.g., ones that do not contain
a "/"), this should be the same as the
<code>dirname</code>. This <code>id</code> will be used to
identify libraries and, for HTML output, will be used as the
base name for the HTML file in which the library's
documentation resides, so it should use only lowercase
alphanumeric characters and underscores.</simpara>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><code>last-revision</code></term>
<listitem>
<simpara>Always set to <code>$Date$</code>, which is
expanded by CVS to include the date and time that the file
was last modified.</simpara>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<para>Inside the &lt;library&gt; element we have the
&lt;libraryinfo&gt; element, which gives information about the
library itself. It contains the author's name (there may be more
than one &lt;author&gt; element), followed by the purpose of the
library and the list of categorizations. The
&lt;librarypurpose&gt; element should always contain a very short
(single sentence) description of the library's purpose, and should
<emphasis>not</emphasis> terminate with a period.</para>
<para>The list of categories is specified by a set of
&lt;librarycategory&gt; elements. Each &lt;librarycategory&gt;
element has a <code>name</code> element that identifies one of the
categories. The actual list of categories is in the file
<filename>doc/src/boost.xml</filename>.
</para>
<para>At this point, we can apply the BoostBook XSL stylesheets to
<code>any.xml</code> (to DocBook) followed by a DocBook XSL
stylesheet to generate HTML output, as described in <xref
linkend="boostbook.getting.started"/>.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>From HTML to BoostBook</title>
<para>Most library authors are comfortable with writing HTML
documentation. Writing <ulink
url="http://www.docbook.org">DocBook</ulink> documentation (and,
by extension, BoostBook documentation) is quite similar to writing
HTML, except that BoostBook uses different element names from HTML
(see <xref linkend="html.to.boostbook"/>) and BoostBook XML is a
much more rigid format than HTML.</para>
<para>One of the easiest ways to convert HTML documentation into
BoostBook documentation is to use <ulink
url="http://tidy.sourceforge.net/">HTML Tidy</ulink> to transform
your HTML into valid XHTML, which will make sure that all elements
are properly closed, then apply the transformations in <xref
linkend="html.to.boostbook"/> to the body of the XHTML
document. The following command uses HTML Tidy to transform HTML
into valid XHTML:</para>
<programlisting>
tidy -asxhtml input.html &gt; output.xhtml</programlisting>
<para>When converting documentation from HTML to BoostBook, note
that some redundant information that has to be manually maintained
in HTML is automatically generated in BoostBook: for instance, the
library categorizations, purpose, and author list described in
<xref linkend="boostbook.defining"/> are used both in the
documentation for the library and to build alphabetical and
categorized lists of known libraries; similarly, tables of
contents are built automatically from the titles of sections in
the BoostBook document.</para>
<table id="html.to.boostbook">
<title>Converting HTML elements to BoostBook</title>
<tgroup cols="2" align="left">
<thead>
<row>
<entry>HTML</entry>
<entry>BoostBook</entry>
</row>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;h1&gt;, &lt;h2&gt;, etc.</simpara></entry>
<entry>
<simpara>&lt;section&gt;, &lt;title&gt;; See <xref
linkend="boostbook.sectioning"/></simpara>
</entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;i&gt;, &lt;em&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;emphasis&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;b&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;emphasis role="bold"&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;ol&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;orderedlist&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;ul&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;itemizedlist&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;li&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;listitem&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;pre&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;programlisting&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;code&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;computeroutput&gt;,&lt;code&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;p&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;para&gt;, &lt;simpara&gt;</simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;a&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry>
<simpara>&lt;xref&gt;, &lt;link&gt;, &lt;ulink&gt;;, See <xref
linkend="boostbook.linking"/></simpara></entry>
</row>
<row>
<entry><simpara>&lt;table&gt;, &lt;tr&gt;, &lt;th&gt;, &lt;td&gt;</simpara></entry>
<entry><simpara>&lt;table&gt;, &lt;informaltable&gt;, &lt;tgroup&gt;, &lt;thead&gt;, &lt;tfoot&gt;, &lt;tbody&gt;, &lt;row&gt;, &lt;entry&gt;, &lt;entrytbl&gt;; BoostBook tables are equivalent to DocBook tables, for which there is a good <ulink url="http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/crash-course/en/tables.html">tutorial here</ulink></simpara></entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
</section>
<section id="boostbook.sectioning">
<title>Sectioning in BoostBook</title>
<para>"Sectioning" refers to organization of a document into separate sections, each with a title, some text, and possibly subsections. Each section is described in BoostBook via a &lt;section&gt; element. An introduction section may look like this:</para>
<programlisting>
&lt;section id="any.intro"&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Introduction&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;para&gt;Introduction to a library...&lt;/para&gt;
&lt;section&gt;
&lt;title&gt;A Subsection&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;para&gt;Subsection information...&lt;/para&gt;
&lt;/section&gt;
&lt;/section&gt;
</programlisting>
<para>The &lt;section&gt; element contains all information that
should logically be grouped within that section. The title of the
section is placed within the &lt;title&gt; element, and any
paragraphs, programs, lists, tables, or subsections can occur
within the section. The <code>id</code> attribute of the
&lt;section&gt; element gives a unique ID to each section, so that
it may later be identified for linking. It is suggested that all
IDs start with the short name of a library followed by a period,
so that IDs do not conflict between libraries.</para>
</section>
</chapter>