3. Documentation Guidelines

All formal documents are maintained in Docbook SGML and located in the doc/source/* directory. You will need Docbook, the Docbook DTD's and the Docbook modular stylesheets (or comparable alternatives), and either jade or openjade (recommended) installed in order to build docs from source. Currently there is user-manual, FAQ, and, of course this, the developer-manual in this format. The README, AUTHORS, INSTALL, privoxy.1 (man page), and config files are also now maintained as Docbook SGML. These files, when built, in the top-level source directory are generated files! Also, the Privoxy index.html (and a variation on this file, privoxy-index.html, meant for inclusion with doc packages), are maintained as SGML as well. DO NOT edit these directly. Edit the SGML source, or contact someone involved in the documentation.

config requires some special handling. The reason it is maintained this way is so that the extensive comments in the file mirror those in user-manual. But the conversion process requires going from SGML to HTML to text to special formatting required for the embedded comments. Some of this does not survive so well. Especially some of the examples that are longer than 80 characters. The build process for this file outputs to config.new, which should be reviewed for errors and mis-formatting. Once satisfied that it is correct, then it should be hand copied to config.

Other, less formal documents (e.g. LICENSE) are maintained as plain text files in the top-level source directory.

Packagers are encouraged to include this documentation. For those without the ability to build the docs locally, text versions of each are kept in CVS. HTML versions are also being kept in CVS under doc/webserver/*. And PDF version are kept in doc/pdf/*.

Formal documents are built with the Makefile targets of make dok, or alternately make redhat-dok. If you have problems, try both. The build process uses the document SGML sources in doc/source/*/* to update all text files in doc/text/ and to update all HTML documents in doc/webserver/.

Documentation writers should please make sure documents build successfully before committing to CVS, if possible.

How do you update the webserver (i.e. the pages on privoxy.org)?

  1. First, build the docs by running make dok (or alternately make redhat-dok). For PDF docs, do make dok-pdf.

  2. Run make webserver which copies all files from doc/webserver to the sourceforge webserver via scp.

Finished docs should be occasionally submitted to CVS (doc/webserver/*/*.html) so that those without the ability to build them locally, have access to them if needed. This is especially important just prior to a new release! Please do this after the $VERSION and other release specific data in configure.in has been updated (this is done just prior to a new release).

3.1. Quickstart to Docbook and SGML

If you are not familiar with SGML, it is a markup language similar to HTML. Actually, not a mark up language per se, but a language used to define markup languages. In fact, HTML is an SGML application. Both will use "tags" to format text and other content. SGML tags can be much more varied, and flexible, but do much of the same kinds of things. The tags, or "elements", are definable in SGML. There is no set "standards". Since we are using Docbook, our tags are those that are defined by Docbook. Much of how the finish document is rendered is determined by the "stylesheets". The stylesheets determine how each tag gets translated to HTML, or other formats.

Tags in Docbook SGML need to be always "closed". If not, you will likely generate errors. Example: <title>My Title</title>. They are also case-insensitive, but we strongly suggest using all lower case. This keeps compatibility with [Docbook] XML.

Our documents use "sections" for the most part. Sections will be processed into HTML headers (e.g. h1 for sect1). The Docbook stylesheets will use these to also generate the Table of Contents for each doc. Our TOC's are set to a depth of three. Meaning sect1, sect2, and sect3 will have TOC entries, but sect4 will not. Each section requires a <title> element, and at least one <para>. There is a limit of five section levels in Docbook, but generally three should be sufficient for our purposes.

Some common elements that you likely will use:

<para></para>, paragraph delimiter. Most text needs to be within paragraph elements (there are some exceptions).
<emphasis></emphasis>, the stylesheets make this italics.
<filename></filename>, files and directories.
<command></command>, command examples.
<literallayout></literallayout>, like <pre>, more or less.
<itemizedlist></itemizedlist>, list with bullets.
<listitem></listitem>, member of the above.
<screen></screen>, screen output, implies <literallayout>.
<ulink url="example.com"></ulink>, like HTML <a> tag.
<quote></quote>, for, doh, quoting text.

Look at any of the existing docs for examples of all these and more.

You might also find "Writing Documentation Using DocBook - A Crash Course" useful.

3.2. Privoxy Documentation Style

It will be easier if everyone follows a similar writing style. This just makes it easier to read what someone else has written if it is all done in a similar fashion.

Here it is:

3.3. Privoxy Custom Entities

Privoxy documentation is using a number of customized "entities" to facilitate documentation maintenance.

We are using a set of "boilerplate" files with generic text, that is used by multiple docs. This way we can write something once, and use it repeatedly without having to re-write the same content over and over again. If editing such a file, keep in mind that it should be generic. That is the purpose; so it can be used in varying contexts without additional modifications.

We are also using what Docbook calls "internal entities". These are like variables in programming. Well, sort of. For instance, we have the p-version entity that contains the current Privoxy version string. You are strongly encouraged to use these where possible. Some of these obviously require re-setting with each release (done by the Makefile). A sampling of custom entities are listed below. See any of the main docs for examples.

There are others in various places that are defined for a specific purpose. Read the source!