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This section contains specific notes about particular documents managed by the FDP.
The Handbook is written to comply with the FreeBSD DocBook extended DTD.
The Handbook is organized as a DocBook <book>. It is then divided into <part>s, each of which may contain several <chapter>s. <chapter>s are further subdivided into sections (<sect1>) and subsections (<sect2>, <sect3>) and so on.
There are a number of files and directories within the handbook directory.
Note: The Handbook's organization may change over time, and this document may lag in detailing the organizational changes. If you have any questions about how the Handbook is organized, please contact the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list.
The Makefile defines some variables that affect how the XML source is converted to other formats, and lists the various source files that make up the Handbook. It then includes the standard doc.project.mk file, to bring in the rest of the code that handles converting documents from one format to another.
This is the top level document in the Handbook. It contains the Handbook's DOCTYPE declaration, as well as the elements that describe the Handbook's structure.
book.xml uses parameter entities to load in the files with the .ent extension. These files (described later) then define general entities that are used throughout the rest of the Handbook.
Each chapter in the Handbook is stored in a file called chapter.xml in a separate directory from the other chapters. Each directory is named after the value of the id attribute on the <chapter> element.
For example, if one of the chapter files contains:
<chapter id="kernelconfig"> ... </chapter>
Then it will be called chapter.xml in the kernelconfig directory. In general, the entire contents of the chapter will be held in this file.
When the XHTML version of the Handbook is produced, this will yield kernelconfig.html. This is because of the id value, and is not related to the name of the directory.
In earlier versions of the Handbook the files were stored in the same directory as book.xml, and named after the value of the id attribute on the file's <chapter> element. Now, it is possible to include images in each chapter. Images for each Handbook chapter are stored within share/images/books/handbook. Note that localized version of these images should be placed in the same directory as the XML sources for each chapter. Namespace collisions would be inevitable, and it is easier to work with several directories with a few files in them than it is to work with one directory that has many files in it.
A brief look will show that there are many directories with individual chapter.xml files, including basics/chapter.xml, introduction/chapter.xml, and printing/chapter.xml.
Important: Chapters and/or directories should not be named in a fashion that reflects their ordering within the Handbook. This ordering might change as the content within the Handbook is reorganized; this sort of reorganization should not (generally) include the need to rename files (unless entire chapters are being promoted or demoted within the hierarchy).
Each chapter.xml file will not be a complete XML document. In particular, they will not have their own DOCTYPE lines at the start of the files.
This is unfortunate as it makes it impossible to treat these as generic XML files and simply convert them to HTML, RTF, PS, and other formats in the same way the main Handbook is generated. This would force you to rebuild the Handbook every time you want to see the effect a change has had on just one chapter.