The FDP uses a number of different software tools to help manage the FreeBSD documentation, convert it to different output formats, and so on. You will need to use these tools yourself if you are to work with the FreeBSD documentation.
All these tools are available as FreeBSD Ports and Packages, greatly simplifying the work you have to do to install them.
You will need to install these tools before you work through any of the examples in later chapters. The actual usage of these tools is covered in later chapters.
Use textproc/docproj If Possible: You can save yourself a lot of time if you install the textproc/docproj port. This is a meta-port which does not contain any software itself. Instead, it depends on various other ports being installed correctly. Installing this port should automatically download and install all of the packages listed in this chapter that you need.
One of the packages that you might need is the JadeTeX macro set. In turn, this macro set requires TeX to be installed. TeX is a large package, and you only need it if you want to produce Postscript or PDF output.
To save yourself time and space you must specify whether or not you want JadeTeX (and therefore TeX) installed when you install this port. Either do:
# make JADETEX=yes installor
# make JADETEX=no installas necessary. Alternatively you may install textproc/docproj-jadetex or textproc/docproj-nojadetex. These slave ports define the JADETEX variable for you, therefore they will install the same suite of applications on your machine. Note that you can produce only HTML or ASCII text output if you do not install JadeTeX. PostScript or PDF output require TeX.
These programs are required before you can usefully work with the FreeBSD documentation, and they will allow you to convert the documentation to HTML, plain text, and RTF formats. They are all included in textproc/docproj.
A DSSSL implementation. Used for converting marked up documents to other formats, including HTML and TeX.
An HTML “pretty printer”, used to reformat some of the automatically generated HTML so that it is easier to follow.
A text-mode WWW browser that can also convert HTML files to plain text.
Some of the documentation includes images, some of which are stored as EPS files. These must be converted to PNG before most web browsers will display them.
These are the DTDs and entity sets used by the FDP. They need to be installed before you can work with any of the documentation.
HTML is the markup language of choice for the World Wide Web, and is used throughout the FreeBSD web site.
DocBook is designed for marking up technical documentation. All the FreeBSD documentation is written in DocBook.
19 of the ISO 8879:1986 character entity sets used by many DTDs. Includes named mathematical symbols, additional characters in the Latin character set (accents, diacriticals, and so on), and Greek symbols.
The stylesheets are used when converting and formatting the documentation for display on screen, printing, and so on.
The Modular DocBook Stylesheets are used when converting documentation marked up in DocBook to other formats, such as HTML or RTF.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.
For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.