Documentation as books

[Shaun McCance]

On Thu, 2014-10-23 at 18:15 -0700, Elizabeth K. Joseph wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 6:39 AM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > In the past somebody somehow seems to have converted our official
> > documentation to books.
> >
> > Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Desktop Guide
> > http://books.google.se/books?id=vJ_03jX2ZRQC
> >
> > Ubuntu 11.04 Server Guide
> > http://books.google.se/books?id=gpbk66Y_s5sC
> >
> > Anybody who can tell anything about how it was done?
> 
> Confirmed by looking back at the archive, 11.04 was the last release
> that the team used DocBook for both Desktop and Server guides, meaning
> outputting a PDF of the Desktop guide was a pretty standard and
> trivial thing with DocBook (as Doug points out, we still do it for the
> Server Guide). During the Oneric (11.10) cycle the team switched over
> to Mallard.
> 
> A quick search tells me that Mallard can output to .epub, which then
> you could convert to .pdf but I have no idea how that would turn out.
> I started digging into the html/Makefile to tease out what I'd need to
> do to generate an epub with yelp-build but style cleanup we have in
> that Makefile started to make me a bit scared to attempt it on a night
> I want to sleep :)

You probably don't even want to touch the Makefile to get epub output.
Just pass the page files to yelp-build, or just use "." to get all the
page files in the current directory. So in C/:

yelp-build epub -o ubuntu-user-guide.epub .

If you want to get epubs for the translations, then you're probably best
off using make to get the translated pages, then calling yelp-build epub
in those directories.

Let me know if you need any help.

--
Shaun