quickbook 1.1

Joel de Guzman

Eric Niebler

Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt )

Introduction

"Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?"

-- Terrence Parr, author ANTLR/PCCTS

Well, QuickBook started as a weekend hack. It was originally intended to be a sample application using Spirit. What is it? What you are viewing now, this documentation, is autogenerated by QuickBook. These files were generated from one master:

quickbook.qbk

Originally named QuickDoc, this funky tool that never dies evolved into a funkier tool thanks to Eric Niebler who resurrected the project making it generate BoostBook instead of HTML. The BoostBook documentation format is an extension of DocBook, an SGML- or XML- based format for describing documentation.

QuickBook is a WikiWiki style documentation tool geared towards C++ documentation using simple rules and markup for simple formatting tasks. QuickBook extends the WikiWiki concept. Like the WikiWiki, QuickBook documents are simple text files. A single QuickBook document can generate a fully linked set of nice HTML and PostScript/PDF documents complete with images and syntax- colorized source code.

Features include:

generate BoostBook xml, to generate HTML, PostScript and PDF
simple markup to link to Doxygen-generated entities
macro system for simple text substitution
simple markup for italics, bold, preformatted, blurbs, code samples, tables, URLs, anchors, images, etc.
automatic syntax coloring of code samples
CSS support