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<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
<a name="boostbook.documenting"></a>Documenting libraries</h2></div></div></div>
<div class="toc"><dl>
<dt><span class="section"><a href="documenting.html#boostbook.defining">Defining a BoostBook library</a></span></dt>
<dt><span class="section"><a href="documenting.html#id3223148">From HTML to BoostBook</a></span></dt>
<dt><span class="section"><a href="documenting.html#boostbook.sectioning">Sectioning in BoostBook</a></span></dt>
</dl></div>
<p>BoostBook is an extension to <a href="http://www.docbook.org" target="_top">DocBook</a>, an XML format for
  representing documentation. BoostBook inherits much of its
  functionality and many elements from DocBook that are not
  redocumented here. When writing BoostBook documentation, please
  refer also to <a href="http://docbook.org/tdg/en/index.html" target="_top">DocBook: The Definitive
  Guide</a>.</p>
<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">
<a name="boostbook.defining"></a>Defining a BoostBook library</h3></div></div></div>
<p>BoostBook library documentation is contained entirely within
    a &lt;library&gt; XML element. To create a skeletal library, we
    need to create a new XML document (call it <code class="computeroutput">any.xml</code>)
    that contains basic information about the library. The following
    <a class="link" href="documenting.html#boostbook.documenting.skeletal" title="Example&#160;30.1.&#160;A Skeletal BoostBook Library">BoostBook XML
    example</a> describes basic information about the <a href="http://www.boost.org/libs/any/index.html" target="_top">Boost.Any</a>
    library:</p>
<div class="example">
<a name="boostbook.documenting.skeletal"></a><p class="title"><b>Example&#160;30.1.&#160;A Skeletal BoostBook Library</b></p>
<div class="example-contents"><pre class="programlisting">
&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE library PUBLIC "-//Boost//DTD BoostBook XML V1.0//EN"
  "http://www.boost.org/tools/boostbook/dtd/boostbook.dtd"&gt;
&lt;library name="Any" dirname="any" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
  id="any" last-revision="$Date: 2008-07-12 20:30:45 +0100 (Sat, 12 Jul 2008) $"&gt;
  &lt;libraryinfo&gt;
    &lt;author&gt;
      &lt;firstname&gt;Kevlin&lt;/firstname&gt;
      &lt;surname&gt;Henney&lt;/surname&gt;
    &lt;/author&gt;
    &lt;librarypurpose&gt;
      Safe, generic container for single values of different value types
    &lt;/librarypurpose&gt; 
    &lt;librarycategory name="category:data-structures"/&gt;
  &lt;/libraryinfo&gt;
&lt;/library&gt;
</pre></div>
</div>
<br class="example-break"><p>The first three lines identify this document as a BoostBook
    <a href="http://www.w3.org/XML/" target="_top">XML</a> document. The
    DOCTYPE line states that the document conforms to the BoostBook
    DTD, and that the top-level element is a BoostBook
    &lt;library&gt;.</p>
<p>The &lt;library&gt; element actually describes the aspects
    of BoostBook library documentation. The attributes for the
    &lt;library&gt; element are:</p>
<div class="variablelist">
<p class="title"><b>Attributes for the &lt;library&gt; element</b></p>
<dl>
<dt><span class="term"><code class="computeroutput">name</code></span></dt>
<dd>The full name of the library, e.g., "Any"</dd>
<dt><span class="term"><code class="computeroutput">dirname</code></span></dt>
<dd>The name of the directory, relative to
            <code class="computeroutput">boost/libs</code>, in which the library
            resides. This name may be a relative path, such as
            <code class="computeroutput">math/octonion</code>, using "/" for the directory
            separator.</dd>
<dt><span class="term"><code class="computeroutput">id</code></span></dt>
<dd>A short, unique name for the library. For libraries
          with simple directory names (e.g., ones that do not contain
          a "/"), this should be the same as the
          <code class="computeroutput">dirname</code>. This <code class="computeroutput">id</code> will be used to
          identify libraries and, for HTML output, will be used as the
          base name for the HTML file in which the library's
          documentation resides, so it should use only lowercase
          alphanumeric characters and underscores.</dd>
<dt><span class="term"><code class="computeroutput">last-revision</code></span></dt>
<dd>Always set to <code class="computeroutput">$Date: 2008-07-12 20:30:45 +0100 (Sat, 12 Jul 2008) $</code>, which is
          expanded by CVS to include the date and time that the file
          was last modified.</dd>
</dl>
</div>
<p>Inside the &lt;library&gt; element we have the
    &lt;libraryinfo&gt; element, which gives information about the
    library itself. It contains the author's name (there may be more
    than one &lt;author&gt; element), followed by the purpose of the
    library and the list of categorizations. The
    &lt;librarypurpose&gt; element should always contain a very short
    (single sentence) description of the library's purpose, and should
    <span class="emphasis"><em>not</em></span> terminate with a period.</p>
<p>The list of categories is specified by a set of
    &lt;librarycategory&gt; elements. Each &lt;librarycategory&gt;
    element has a <code class="computeroutput">name</code> element that identifies one of the
    categories. The actual list of categories is in the file
    <code class="filename">doc/src/boost.xml</code>.
    </p>
<p>At this point, we can apply the BoostBook XSL stylesheets to
    <code class="computeroutput">any.xml</code> (to DocBook) followed by a DocBook XSL
    stylesheet to generate HTML output, as described in <a class="xref" href="getting/started.html" title="Getting Started">the section called &#8220;Getting Started&#8221;</a>.</p>
</div>
<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">
<a name="id3223148"></a>From HTML to BoostBook</h3></div></div></div>
<p>Most library authors are comfortable with writing HTML
    documentation. Writing <a href="http://www.docbook.org" target="_top">DocBook</a> documentation (and,
    by extension, BoostBook documentation) is quite similar to writing
    HTML, except that BoostBook uses different element names from HTML
    (see <a class="xref" href="documenting.html#html.to.boostbook" title="Table&#160;30.2.&#160;Converting HTML elements to BoostBook">Table&#160;30.2, &#8220;Converting HTML elements to BoostBook&#8221;</a>) and BoostBook XML is a
    much more rigid format than HTML.</p>
<p>One of the easiest ways to convert HTML documentation into
    BoostBook documentation is to use <a href="http://tidy.sourceforge.net/" target="_top">HTML Tidy</a> to transform
    your HTML into valid XHTML, which will make sure that all elements
    are properly closed, then apply the transformations in <a class="xref" href="documenting.html#html.to.boostbook" title="Table&#160;30.2.&#160;Converting HTML elements to BoostBook">Table&#160;30.2, &#8220;Converting HTML elements to BoostBook&#8221;</a> to the body of the XHTML
    document. The following command uses HTML Tidy to transform HTML
    into valid XHTML:</p>
<pre class="programlisting">
  tidy -asxhtml input.html &gt; output.xhtml</pre>
<p>When converting documentation from HTML to BoostBook, note
    that some redundant information that has to be manually maintained
    in HTML is automatically generated in BoostBook: for instance, the
    library categorizations, purpose, and author list described in
    <a class="xref" href="documenting.html#boostbook.defining" title="Defining a BoostBook library">the section called &#8220;Defining a BoostBook library&#8221;</a> are used both in the
    documentation for the library and to build alphabetical and
    categorized lists of known libraries; similarly, tables of
    contents are built automatically from the titles of sections in
    the BoostBook document.</p>
<div class="table">
<a name="html.to.boostbook"></a><p class="title"><b>Table&#160;30.2.&#160;Converting HTML elements to BoostBook</b></p>
<div class="table-contents"><table class="table" summary="Converting HTML elements to BoostBook">
<colgroup>
<col>
<col>
</colgroup>
<thead><tr>
<th align="left">HTML</th>
<th align="left">BoostBook</th>
</tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;h1&gt;, &lt;h2&gt;, etc.</p></td>
<td align="left">
<p>&lt;section&gt;, &lt;title&gt;; See <a class="xref" href="documenting.html#boostbook.sectioning" title="Sectioning in BoostBook">the section called &#8220;Sectioning in BoostBook&#8221;</a></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;i&gt;, &lt;em&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;emphasis&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;b&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;emphasis role="bold"&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;ol&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;orderedlist&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;ul&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;itemizedlist&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;li&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;listitem&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;pre&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;programlisting&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;code&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;computeroutput&gt;,&lt;code&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;p&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;para&gt;, &lt;simpara&gt;</p></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;a&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left">
<p>&lt;xref&gt;, &lt;link&gt;, &lt;ulink&gt;;, See <a class="xref" href="together.html#boostbook.linking" title="Linking in BoostBook">the section called &#8220;Linking in BoostBook&#8221;</a></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;table&gt;, &lt;tr&gt;, &lt;th&gt;, &lt;td&gt;</p></td>
<td align="left"><p>&lt;table&gt;, &lt;informaltable&gt;, &lt;tgroup&gt;, &lt;thead&gt;, &lt;tfoot&gt;, &lt;tbody&gt;, &lt;row&gt;, &lt;entry&gt;, &lt;entrytbl&gt;; BoostBook tables are equivalent to DocBook tables, for which there is a good <a href="http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/crash-course/en/tables.html" target="_top">tutorial here</a></p></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table></div>
</div>
<br class="table-break">
</div>
<div class="section">
<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">
<a name="boostbook.sectioning"></a>Sectioning in BoostBook</h3></div></div></div>
<p>"Sectioning" refers to organization of a document into separate sections, each with a title, some text, and possibly subsections. Each section is described in BoostBook via a &lt;section&gt; element. An introduction section may look like this:</p>
<pre class="programlisting">
&lt;section id="any.intro"&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;Introduction&lt;/title&gt;
 
  &lt;para&gt;Introduction to a library...&lt;/para&gt;

  &lt;section&gt;
    &lt;title&gt;A Subsection&lt;/title&gt;
    &lt;para&gt;Subsection information...&lt;/para&gt;
  &lt;/section&gt;
&lt;/section&gt;
</pre>
<p>The &lt;section&gt; element contains all information that
    should logically be grouped within that section. The title of the
    section is placed within the &lt;title&gt; element, and any
    paragraphs, programs, lists, tables, or subsections can occur
    within the section. The <code class="computeroutput">id</code> attribute of the
    &lt;section&gt; element gives a unique ID to each section, so that
    it may later be identified for linking. It is suggested that all
    IDs start with the short name of a library followed by a period,
    so that IDs do not conflict between libraries.</p>
</div>
</div>
<table xmlns:rev="http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~gregod/boost/tools/doc/revision" width="100%"><tr>
<td align="left"></td>
<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright &#169; 2003-2005 Douglas Gregor<p>Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
      (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
      <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>).
      </p>
</div></td>
</tr></table>
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