Tag Archives: dblatex

Building PDFs of documentation

Still working on that coursework project, I'm now building PDFs of the three pieces of documentation the application itself requires: the API reference, the source code listings and the user manual.

Using gtk-doc to build the API reference makes it quite easy to add something in the Makefile to build a PDF from the DocBook:

docs/reference/Makefile.am

I've put this at the bottom of the Makefile.am, and it's all working nicely, apart from the fact that distcheck (legitimately) complains about me redefining all-local. I can't find any other way to make it build the PDF while also building the normal docs with make docs, so my question here is: how do I make this implementation cleaner?

If anybody wants to use it, they'll need to install dblatex.

The next piece of documentation is the source code listing. This is completely custom, using source-highlight to make LaTeX files for each source file, and then pdflatex to build them into a PDF.

docs/source/Makefile.am

I'm quite pleased with the way this works, although I'm sure there will be better solutions out there. source-highlight deposits many LaTeX files in the build directory, which are then included in the PDF build by dint of being automatically concatenated together and included by a surrounding LaTeX file, project-name-source.tex.

docs/source/two-hundred-club-source.tex

Finally, the user manual also needs building into a PDF. This again uses dblatex, although it's a little more complex, as a PDF has to be built for each language directory in the help directory.

docs/help/Makefile.am

Hopefully some of that will be helpful to somebody in a similar situation, and I'd welcome any hints or pointers as to how to improve the implementations, as my automake powers are about as strong as a damp tissue.