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<?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="i2c_sensors"/>
  </links>-->
</head>
<body>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The whole documentation is generated through a make system, which uses <tt>xmllint</tt> to check the validy of the xml files and <tt>xsltproc</tt> to process them and generate the XHTML pages. <i>These two programs are mandatory</i></p>

<h2>The syntax</h2>
A doc page looks like this :
<conf>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?&gt;
&lt;?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="../xsl/doc.xsl"?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE doc SYSTEM "../dtd/doc.dtd"&gt;
&lt;doc&gt;
&lt;head&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;How to write documentation for &l4l; ?&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;ref&gt;write_doc&lt;/ref&gt;
  &lt;links&gt;
    &lt;link ref="http://lcd4linux.sf.net"/&gt;
  &lt;/links&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body&gt;
...
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/doc&gt;
</conf>

<li>The three first lines are the preambule of the file, don't touch them.</li>
<li>The root of the document is <tt>&lt;doc&gt;</tt>, it's the equivalent of &lt;html&gt;.</li>
<li>Then, there's a <tt>&lt;head&gt;</tt> node, containing the information about the page. See later for the childs.</li>
<li>The core of the doc is the &lt;body&gt; node, like in HTML, containing the content.</li>

<h3>The &lt;head&gt;</h3>
The head contains some information about the document :
<li>&lt;title&gt; is the title of the document, which will be displayed as a &lt;h1&gt;</li>
<li>&lt;ref&gt; is a unique reference for the document, which is assumed to be the same as in <i>references.xml</i> (we'll discuss later about this file)</li>
<li>&lt;links&gt; is the section responsible of the "See Alo" box, containing links to other help pages, or to urls. It can contain several &lt;link&gt; elements, whose syntax is explained in the next part.</li>
<li>There may be other elements, but we'll only use these ones for now.</li>

<h3>The helpers</h3>
You can use a lot of helpers in the body :
<li>&lt;link&gt; is a helper to create links. It is used with one of these two arguments :
<ul>
<li><tt>&lt;link ref="xxx"/&gt;</tt> will create a link to the documentation page associated with this reference (defined in <i>references.xml</i>)</li>
<li><tt>&lt;link url="http://..."/&gt;</tt> will create a link to the url</li>
</ul>
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 <tt>&lt;link url="http://..."&gt;TEXT&lt;/link&gt;</tt>
</li>
<warn>As this is XML, you <b>must</b> close all the tags you open, or use self-closing tags for empty ones :<br/>For example, you have to write <tt>&lt;br/&gt;</tt> but not <tt>&lt;br&gt;.</tt></warn>

<li>&lt;cmd&gt; 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 &amp;nbsp; or &lt;br/&gt;, <b>But beware of &lt; and &gt;</b> (you must replace them with &amp;lt; and &amp;gt;)</li>
<cmd>xav:~$ echo "An example of &lt;cmd&gt; box"
An example of &lt;cmd&gt; box
xav:~$
</cmd>
<li>&lt;conf&gt; works like &lt;cmd&gt; but with black text on grey background, to print lcd4linux.conf examples.</li>
<conf>Widget Lightning {
    class 'icon'
    speed 100
    visible cpu('busy', 500)-50
    bitmap {
        row1 '...***'
        row2 '..***.'
        row3 '.***..'
        row4 '.****.'
        row5 '..**..'
        row6 '.**...'
        row7 '**....'
        row8 '*.....'
    }
}</conf>
<li>&lt;note&gt; is to display a box with a small icon, to point out a detail, or an advice</li>
<note>To dry a wet cat, don't put it in a microwave ;)</note>
<li>&lt;warn&gt; works like &lt;note&gt; 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 ;)</li>
<warn>We're not responsible for damages caused to your microwave if you don't read the above note !</warn>
<li>&lt;index&gt; is a cool thing. It displays the list of pages of a specified class. It's used to display indexes. For example &lt;index class="drivers"/&gt; 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.</li>
<li>&lt;new&gt; is in the DTD, but is not yet implemented :/</li>
<li>You can use any other XHTML-valid tag. The most used should be : &lt;br/&gt; &lt;h2&gt; &lt;h3&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;b&gt; &lt;i&gt; &lt;tt&gt; ...</li>

<h3>references.xml</h3>
There's a file in <tt>data/</tt> called <tt>references.xml</tt>. 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.<br/>
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.
<note>A null &lt;class/&gt; 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)</note>

<h2>The compilation system</h2>
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, <tt>lcd4linux</tt>, <tt>drivers</tt> and <tt>plugins</tt>). In these subdirs, the Makefile is a link to <tt>Makefile.generic</tt>.<br/>
To compile the documentation, just type make at the toplevel, and look in the <tt>HTML</tt> folder. Type make help for help ;)
<warn>Two programs are mandatory to build the documentation :
<ul><li><tt>xmllint</tt> from libxml2 is used to validate the xml pages to be processed. It's in the debian package <tt>libxml2</tt></li>
<li><tt>xsltproc</tt> from libxslt processes the xml files to generate the html pages. It's in the libxslt tarballs or in the <tt>xsltproc</tt> debian package</li></ul>
</warn>
</body>
</doc>