One of the key advantages of the DocBook format is that the source documentation can be transformed into a wide variety of formats, including HTML, chunked HTML, XHTML, PDF, and a number of other formats. There are a wide variety of tools that are capable of performing this task. Basically the XML source of the document is transformed using the standard DocBook XSL style sheets into the desired format. The complete list of tools capable of transforming DocBook will not be listed here, but a few examples are provided below.
Latest builds of the documentation are available
In order to transform the documentation source files to different
formats, such as HTML or PDF, you will need to install the Apache Maven
program. You can get a copy here or by installing
it through your package manager if you are using Linux. Just execute
the command mvn clean package on Windows or
on Linux from the
/dhis2-docbook-docs directory. Maven will start to
download the necessary components to transform the documents into HMTL and
PDF. Once the process has completed (be patient the first time, as there
are a number of components that must be downloaded), all of the target
document types will be generated in the
/dhis2-docbook-docs/target/docbkx directory. HTML
documents will be in the HTML directory, and PDF documents will be in the
PDF directory.
xmlto is a useful utility available on Linux platforms for transforming DocBook documents into many different formats. More informtion on the package can be found here. If you do not want to use Apache Maven for some reason, you can install xmlto through your package manager. Once you have installed xmlto you can just execute xmlto htmlfile_to_transform where the file_to_transform parameter is the name of the file you wish to transform. There are many other formats available, such as PDF, PS, JavaHelp and others.