Re: Learnign DocBook

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 06:59, Muthiah Annamalai wrote:
> How do I learn Doc book ? 
> Please help.
> Cheers
> Muthu.

The GDP could really stand to put together a "starting out" document. 
But since we don't have one, I'll point you to the Fedora Documentation
Project's guide.

http://www.fedora.redhat.com/participate/documentation-guide/

The document assumes you know the basics of XML markup, and Chapter 6
explains only the pieces of DocBook you're likely to need to start out. 
One caveat: The FDP guide doesn't explain the use of the articleinfo and
bookinfo tags for metadata.  We have some standard tags which we always
include in the articleinfo/bookinfo of Gnome docs.  You can get a sense
of what tags to put there by reading other people's docs.

Also, there are some minimal examples in gnome-docu in CVS.  You can
grab gnome-docu from anonymous CVS with

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome co gnome-docu

The first command will ask for a password.  Just hit Enter.  You'll now
have a directoy called gnome-docu.  In there is this directory:

gnome-docu/gdp/gdp-example2/help/gdp-example2-manual/C/

And in there is the file gdp-example2-manual.xml.  That file should be a
good boilerplate example you can use to develop your own docs.

You can always ask questions on this list, or just onto IRC and ask. 
Many of us hang out on the #docs channel on GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org).

--
Shaun