LDP Author Guide

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LDP Author Guide
Mark F. Komarinski
<mkomarinski@wayga.org>
Jorge Godoy
Conectiva S.A.
Publishing Department
<godoy@conectiva.com>
<godoy@metalab.unc.edu>
David C. Merrill
<dcmerrill@mindspring.com>
Emma Jane Hogbin - Separation of the authoring process (main guide) and technical HOWTOs (appendix).
2004-01-27
Revision History
Revision 4.1 2004-01-27 Revised by: ejh
Updated the license requirements and added them to the table of contents (moved them "up" a section).
This guide describes the process of submitting and publishing a document with The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP). It includes information about the tools, toolchains and formats used by TLDP. The document's primary audience is new TLDP authors, but it also contains information for seasoned documentation authors.
Table of Contents
1. About this Guide
1.1. About this Guide
1.2. About The LDP
1.3. Feedback
1.4. Copyrights and Trademarks
1.5. Acknowledgments and Thanks
1.6. Document Conventions
2. Authoring TLDP Documents: An Introduction
2.1. Contributing to The LDP
2.2. Summary of The LDP Process
2.3. Mailing Lists
3. Writing Your Proposal
3.1. Choosing a Subject
3.2. Scope of Your Document
3.3. Unmaintained and Out-of-date Documents
3.4. Developing an Outline
3.5. Research
4. Write
4.1. Writing the Text
4.2. Edit and Proofread the Text
4.3. Tools for Writing, Editing and Maintaining your Document
5. Markup
5.1. Markup: A General Overview
5.2. DocBook: What it is and why we use it
5.3. XML and SGML: Why we use XML
5.4. Markup Languages Accepted by TLDP
6. Distributing Your Documentation
6.1. Before Distributing Your Documentation
6.2. Licensing and Copyright
6.3. Acknowledgments
6.4. TLDP Review Process
6.5. Submission to LDP for publication
7. Maintain
7.1. Maintaining Your HOWTO
References
A. Templates
A.1. Book Templates
A.2. Style Sheets
A.3. GNU Free Documentation License
B. System Setup: Editors, Validation and Transformations
B.1. Tools for your operating system
B.2. Editing tools
B.3. Validation
B.4. Transformations
B.5. DocBook DTD
B.6. Formatting Documents
C. Concurrent Version System (CVS)
C.1. Getting a CVS account
C.2. Using CVS
D. DocBook: Sample Markup
D.1. General Tips and Tricks
D.2. <section> and <sectN>: what's the difference?
D.3. Command Prompts
D.4. Encoding Indexes
D.5. Inserting Pictures
D.6. Markup for Metadata
D.7. Bibliographies
D.8. Entities (shortcuts, text macros and re-usable text)
D.9. Customizing your HTML files
E. Converting Documents to DocBook XML
E.1. Differences between XML and SGML
E.2. Changing DTDs
Glossary
F. GNU Free Documentation License
F.1. 0. PREAMBLE
F.2. 1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
F.3. 2. VERBATIM COPYING
F.4. 3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
F.5. 4. MODIFICATIONS
F.6. 5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
F.7. 6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
F.8. 7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
F.9. 8. TRANSLATION
F.10. 9. TERMINATION
F.11. 10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
F.12. Addendum
List of Tables
D-1. Useful markup
List of Figures
B-1. epcEdit screen shot
B-2. nedit screen shot
B-3. Adding shell commands to nedit
B-4. nsgmls output on success
List of Examples
B-1. Setting the SGML_CATALOG_FILES and XML_CATALOG_FILES Environmental Variables
B-2. Example of an SGML catalog
B-3. Sample XML Catalog file
B-4. Debugging example using xmllint
B-5. "Installing" DSSSL style sheets
B-6. Example creating HTML output
B-7. "Installing" DocBook Document Type Definitions
B-8. Style sheet to insert summaries in articles
B-9. Configuring an external entity to include the index
D-1. Command Prompt with programlisting
D-2. Command Prompt with screen
D-3. Code for the generation of an index
D-4. Use of the attribute zone
D-5. Usage of values startofrange and endofrange on the attributeclass
D-6. Inserting a picture
D-7. Using <imageobject>
D-8. Other Credit
D-9. Sample Meta Data
D-10. A Bibliography
D-11. Adding Entities
D-12. Use of parameter entities
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