The MySQL documentation team has created a way that enables us to extract arbitrary pieces of MySQL documentation and recombine them into a new document. With that machinery for creating arbitrary docs, we could, for example, do this:
* Bond the Cluster docs with the rest of the Storage Engines. * Create a Cluster and Partitioning standalone guide. * Collate all the Windows sections into a single document. * Create a Connectors/APIs document where each of the current connector sections is a chapter in the new book. * Put a section anywhere, and remap any section to any block (i.e. section to chapter or appendix, chapter to appendix, you name it). Basically, we can combine excerpts from any documentation that can be found on http://dev.mysql.com/doc. The arbitrary docs machinery doesn't work in a copy-and-paste manner, but rather by including blocks (chapters, appendices, or sections) of the original documentation. This means that whenever the underlying documentation changes the arbitrary docs will also change. (You may have noticed that this concept is similar to views in a database.) This is what our users can do with that machinery: 1. Look at our sample PDF file that demonstrates what can be done; it combines all Windows-related installation instructions from various docs files: http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysqldoc/arbitrary/windows-sample.pdf 2. Tell us ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) which new excerpts or combinations of documents you'd like us to create and make available on http://dev.mysql.com/doc. 3. Create arbitrary docs yourself. For this, you can find everything you need in the public copy of our mysqldoc repository (viewable with any web browser) on http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/documentation. To see how creating your own arbitrary documents works, try our sample files: 1. Use Subversion (SVN) to pull a working copy of http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysqldoc. 2. You need an environment that has "make" and "xsltproc" installed (any Unix-like system, or Cygwin on Windows). To create PDF files, you also need "fop". 3. A sample arbitrary specification file (windows.aspec) and the necessary DocBook wrapper (windows.xml) are located in the "arbitrary" directory. A sample of the file generated from that specification is provided as windows-sample.pdf. 4. To generate HTML or PDF output for yourself: * Change to the upmost directory and run "make realclean" - this will clean out any old and temporary files. * Change to the "arbitrary" directory and run "make idmap.refs" - this will rebuild all the ID map reference files which are required for the arbitrary functionality. * Within "arbitrary", run "make windows-arbitrary.pdf" to make the PDF version, or "make windows-arbitrary.html" to create the HTML version. Regards, Stefan -- Stefan Hinz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MySQL AB Documentation Team Lead. Berlin, Germany (UTC +1:00) Skype:stefanhinz Cell:+491777841069 Desk:+493082702940 Fax:+493082702941 -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
