How to write documentation for &l4l; ? write_doc

Overview

The &l4l; documentation is composed of XML files which are processed with XSL stylesheets to produce XHTML files. There these XML files are writen in a syntax similar to the HTML syntax, plus some helpers.

The whole documentation is generated through a make system, which uses xmllint to check the validy of the xml files and xsltproc to process them and generate the XHTML pages. These two programs are mandatory

The syntax

A doc page looks like this : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="../xsl/doc.xsl"?> <!DOCTYPE doc SYSTEM "../dtd/doc.dtd"> <doc> <head> <title>How to write documentation for &l4l; ?</title> <ref>write_doc</ref> <links> <link ref="http://lcd4linux.sf.net"/> </links> </head> <body> ... </body> </doc>
  • The three first lines are the preambule of the file, don't touch them.
  • The root of the document is <doc>, it's the equivalent of <html>.
  • Then, there's a <head> node, containing the information about the page. See later for the childs.
  • The core of the doc is the <body> node, like in HTML, containing the content.

    • The <head>

    The head contains some information about the document :
  • <title> is the title of the document, which will be displayed as a <h1>
  • <ref> is a unique reference for the document, which is assumed to be the same as in references.xml (we'll discuss later about this file)
  • <links> is the section responsible of the "See Alo" box, containing links to other help pages, or to urls. It can contain several <link> elements, whose syntax is explained in the next part.
  • There may be other elements, but we'll only use these ones for now.

    • The helpers

    You can use a lot of helpers in the body :
  • <link> is a helper to create links. It is used with one of these two arguments : Note that if you don't provide a text, the text of the link will be the label of the reference or the url. You can specify a text writing <link url="http://...">TEXT</link>
    • As this is XML, you must close all the tags you open, or use self-closing tags for empty ones :
    For example, you have to write <br/> but not <br>.
  • <cmd> Opens a box with write text on black background, used to indicate something's happening in a console (compilation, logs, ...). The text is in "pre" mode, so spaces and newlines are kept, no need of &nbsp; or <br/>, But beware of < and > (you must replace them with &lt; and &gt;)
    • xav:~$ echo "An example of <cmd> box" An example of <cmd> box xav:~$
  • <conf> works like <cmd> but with black text on grey background, to print lcd4linux.conf examples.
    • Widget Lightning { class 'icon' speed 100 visible cpu('busy', 500)-50 bitmap { row1 '...***' row2 '..***.' row3 '.***..' row4 '.****.' row5 '..**..' row6 '.**...' row7 '**....' row8 '*.....' } }
  • <note> is to display a box with a small icon, to point out a detail, or an advice
    • To dry a wet cat, don't put it in a microwave ;)
  • <warn> works like <note> but with a red exclamation mark and a red border, to display warnings. In general, use a note for a detail or an advice and warn to point configuration problems, hardware hazards, or other happy things ;)
    • We're not responsible for damages caused to your microwave if you don't read the above note !
  • <index> is a cool thing. It displays the list of pages of a specified class. It's used to display indexes. For example <index class="drivers"/> will display a list of all pages about drivers. If there's no class specified, it'll parse the list of pages of the "lcd4linux" class.
  • <new> is in the DTD, but is not yet implemented :/
  • You can use any other XHTML-valid tag. The most used should be : <br/> <h2> <h3> <li> <b> <i> <tt> ...

    • references.xml

    There's a file in data/ called references.xml. It isn't processed directly, but is used to parse links and indexes. It's syntax is quite straightforward, so I won't explain it.
    You must add a new entry in it for each page you write so that other pages can have links to it and index it. A null <class/> attribute corresponds to the lcd4linux class. It's not a bug, it's a feature, used to make links (the lcd4linux class is in the root of the documentation)

    The compilation system

    The documentation is compiled with a Makefile build system. There's a toplevel Makefile which calls the apropriate targets in each subdirs which contains xml files (for the moment, lcd4linux, drivers and plugins). In these subdirs, the Makefile is a link to Makefile.generic.
    To compile the documentation, just type make at the toplevel, and look in the HTML folder. Type make help for help ;) Two programs are mandatory to build the documentation :